Founding director of Club Financial Services Group Andrew Clouston has announced the release of a new product designed to stamp out mortgage fraud in Australia.
Clouston says the product, MOGOcheck, has been so successful in the UK regulators have mandated a major lender to start using MOGO to toughen up the e-authentication process for punters wanting a quick loan, and he expects Australian regulators to follow suit.
“I would envisage we’d be making similar announcements in the Australian market within three months comfortably,” says Clouston.
MOGOcheck is a tool that allows brokers and lenders to provide a customer with a tool that gives them the ability to easily verify and transfer documents back to the lender or broker – in the format that they require.
“The encryption of the data is direct from the source – being the banking site the user is logged into – and the broker or lender then knows the document is and original sourced document and could not have been tampered with in any way whatsoever.”
With positive credit reporting due to come into play in a little over a month, MOGOcheck will also help to fill the void for banks that currently don’t have the technology to gather, supply and process the extra documentation needed, he says.
The motivation for MOGOcheck came from his time as a broker, says Clouston.
“I spent years in the industry wrestling with documents and never knowing which document was an original or may have been tampered with in some way so I went out to source a technology solution that is convenient for customers and provide a risk-free result for lenders.”
The understanding that brokers are often time-poor played a large part in the development process, he said.
“We’ve been very conscious to build it in such a way that most of the work is done on our side and we can deliver data in a secure format to lenders or broker in a format that actually works to their existing systems and processes rather than requiring then to spend months on technology development and things like that. It’s a very easy integration process.”
Increased reports of fraud in the mortgage industry and tighter regulations have helped to drive an “almost overwhelming” amount of interest in the product, says Clouston.
“We have, for all the right reasons, had strong regulation across the mortgage industry for the last 4-5 years and that’s good for the industry and that kind of rigour over what everyone in the industry is doing is an absolute positive for the industry and if the result of that is we are more easily
