Commonwealth Bank is to greatly expand its digital document signing offering, with home loan customers in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia all now able to access, review and sign documents online.
The news will come as a boon to brokers. The mortgage broking industry in particular has shown in the last year that it is highly agile and adaptable, especially when it comes to adopting new technologies and streamlining processes during the pandemic.
For their ability to change to meet new conditions, mortgage brokers were rewarded with a record 60% market share in late 2020, including 57% of all new residential mortgages.
“Over the past 12 months we have heard directly from brokers about the different challenges they have faced in serving their customers,” said Adam Croucher, General Manager Third Party Banking at CBA. “One thing we heard from a number of brokers was that the process of sending and receiving home loan documents could be improved. The constantly changing environment provided us with an opportunity to look at our current process and leverage our best-in-class technology to build a tool that would allow our brokers to better serve their customers not only in the middle of a pandemic but in the future.”
With more and more people banking online, customers have been clamouring for the technology to include home loans, and brokers will be delighted to know that this is now a product that they can offer to their clients who bank with CBA.
Speaking at a recent webinar, the CEO of data-based financial services company Illion Simon Bligh commented on how important digital transformation is to the mortgage broking industry.
"We're seeing rapid adoption of this in consumer lending,” he said. “It began with digital lending, but now it's moved to ‘buy now, pay later’ and it's moving into the mortgage market. If I think about mortgage brokers, there are 16,000 in Australia and 10,000 of them use it. If you're one of the 60% of the market who uses a broker, you'll be offered this tech to show your income and expenditure, and see who can offer you a good mortgage quickly. That's good for everyone.”
