Following Wednesday’s news that online home loan platform Lendi and Aussie Home Loans have entered into an agreement to merge, Lendi CEO and co-founder David Hyman provided Australian Broker further detail around what to expect once the transaction has been completed.
Hyman started by stressing that the decision was a “strategic consolidation”, not just an opportunistic one.
“The strategy is about leveraging the relative strengths of both businesses. Aussie’s got an iconic household brand and Lendi has the leading technology platform, so we’re putting those things together and creating a killer proposition for customers and brokers alike,” he explained.
Hyman said the groups plan to explore what exactly the marriage of their strengths looks like in “a very consultative and opt-in fashion” but, ultimately, the aim is to get Aussie brokers on the Lendi platform.
“We’ll work out a best in breed operating model together with the Aussie guys over the next few months,” said Hyman.
“In a consultative fashion, we’ll work to roll a number of [Aussie] brokers onto our platform over time, but it will be branded Aussie – so the two brands will remain separate. When I say ‘roll onto the platform’, it doesn’t mean customers will be getting a Lendi experience. They’ll be getting an Aussie experience.
“The way to think about it is it’s really going to be an acceleration case for the existing strong relationships those local Aussie franchisees or mobile brokers have with their existing communities.”
Hyman explained that, once on the Lendi platform, Aussie franchisees will continue to serve their same local customers, but in a way that’s been both enhanced and simplified through their technology.
“All the things the Lendi platform does today – and we’re spending tens of millions of dollars on investment to continue advancing the platform – all of those things will, in time, be available to Aussie brokers and Aussie customers,” he said.
“But if a customer comes to Aussie, they’ll see an Aussie experience from start to finish.”
Hyman has reported being “really humbled” by the feedback he’s received after news of the merger broke.
“We’ve had some really, really good questions. People are taking the time to think through what it means to them, the customer experience and the technology development,” he said.
“It’s been overwhelmingly positive, and people are very proud to be involved. I’ve been speaking with the Aussie exec team over the last 24 hours pretty extensively, and very much getting the same message from their side.”
On a macro level, Hyman sees the series of mergers announced in the mortgage broking sector in recent months as a “sign of the industry's maturity”.
“If you go back to the ‘90s and early 2000s, the level of regulation in the industry was much lower. There was a lot of fragmentation,” he explained.
“Today, there are about 17,500 mortgage brokers and lots and lots of aggregation groups. I think the mergers are really just a sign of maturity for the industry; as groups come together, they’re bringing together relative strengths.”
“In the case of AFG and Connective, for example, we saw additional capabilities being brought to the table. AFG has a securities program, while Connective didn’t. Connective has a really strong commercial and asset finance business they bring to AFG.
“What we’re seeing is really consolidation that’s going to drive value back to the two stakeholder groups that ultimately matter: customers and brokers,” Hyman concluded.
