The biggest evolution in the mortgage and finance broking industry will be driven by data scraping technology, the head of the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia (
MFAA) has said.
Speaking at Yellow Brick Road’s inaugural Women in Finance event in Sydney on International Women’s Day yesterday, the CEO of the MFAA Siobhan Hayden said data scraping technology will significantly reduce the time a broker has to spend with a customer.
“There are a lot of digital businesses that are industry agnostic, so they don’t care about having a skillset in a financial background but they are just deploying great systems. You look at technology like Yodalee which facilitates data scraping,” Hayden told the room of 70 brokers.
“This means that the conversation that a broker has today which take up to two hours for a good, solid fact find with a customer – asking all about their expenses, what they do and how they manage their money and budget – can be done very, very quickly. It can be done in a couple of minutes.
“You can data scrap ATO information, bank account information, Xero accounting software platforms – and in a couple of minutes you can have all their analysis done. Effectively the two hours at the front end I think will shorten down to about 30 minutes potentially.”
Whilst this can be a huge benefit for brokers, Hayden says it could also significantly change the broker proposition – and brokers will need to adapt.
“On the bank of end of that is the cost to acquire a customer in a lending environment – and when that reduces, potentially we may be looking at a reduction in what we earn from the third-party channel. But what does that mean for us as a business?
“It means we need to look beyond just being a monoline offering. If you are one broker selling one product… you will need to have at least four or five brokers in a room with file managers to make your business efficient and scalable.
“…Obviously being the centre of influence to your customers around insurance, wealth and residential – all those different aspects – is really, really important.”
