Digital mortgage fintech Nano has smashed the $100 million in approved loans barrier just a month after officially launching.
The lender, which hit the market at the start of July, promised to drastically reduce turnaround times and disrupt the residential mortgage sector via B2C lending and a completely digital structure.
Naturally, CEO Andrew Walker was delighted to have surpassed $100m so quickly.
“We’re impressed with it,” he told Australian Broker. “It was a stretch goal that I gave the team a couple of months ago, and when you hit your stretch goal you feel satisfied so we’re quite pleased with that.”
The movement towards digital mortgages is one that is already happening elsewhere, and that Nano think will inevitably come to Australia.
“We see it a couple of ways,” said Walker. “The macro trend that we are seeing unfold here is the move to digital origination and digital mortgages. It’s a well-established global trend and it’s been exacerbated by Covid.”
“The stats we like to use to illustrate the point are from the US. If you narrow in there, the last 12 months have seen approximately 30% of the flow originated digitally.”
“If you then take a step back and look at the Australian market, if we just catch up to the US within the next five years, which doesn’t seem that ambitious a target, then with an annual flow of $360 billion in the Australian marketplace, it suggests that the digital mortgage market is going to be around $100bn per annum.”
“It’s very difficult to see how that’s not going to be at least mostly true. Customers want to interact digitally, it removes the friction, it streamlines the process and fundamentally alters the time to yes, which is now one of the industry’s key drivers.”
While that might seem like a new third channel of the mortgage sector – in addition to the broker and proprietary channels – Walker said he did not fear for brokers.
“It’s quite clear in my mind that the broker channel will continue to be a powerhouse in the Australian mortgage market,” he said. “The broker channel and their level of customer focus makes that an inevitability.”
“However, a certain amount of the flow into the digital mortgage channel with come from both brokers and branches, though I suspect the branches and the first party origination of the incumbents will be impacted more than the brokers. That’s simply because the broker channel offers a higher level of service.”
