Australia’s largest customer-owned lender has unveiled plans to invest more than $24 million in technology and digital initiatives to enhance the broker and customer experience.
Speaking to Australian Broker, CUA’s general manager of business transformation & technology, Sue Coulter, said a big part of the mutual lender’s digital investment will be launching a new home loan origination system.
“There is a real focus within CUA on enhancing the customer experience, so a lot of our spend in this current financial year is designed to do just that. The loan origination project will be a key component of that investment,” she said.
“The overhaul of our loan origination system is composed of a number of things. The first is the replacement of our existing loan origination system, which we have had now for eight or nine years. This will give us enhanced and straight through credit decisions, settlements, finalisation and reporting, and lots of integration to speed up that whole process.”
Coulter says the most exciting innovation of CUA’s new loan origination system will be its focused and simplified approach to home loans.
“In terms of metrics, we are reducing our ‘time to yes’ by approximately 50%, so customers will get a quicker answer from us. We are also trimming off about 50% of the time it takes normally to issue documentation.
“We have just taken a holistic approach to this and tried to strip out as much time and effort in the process. We wanted our ‘time to yes’ to be quicker and ‘time to documentation’ equally as quick so we can take the uncertainty out of it for customers as quickly as possible.”
According to Coulter, they will do that by looking at the whole end-to-end customer experience, and identifying what steps of the process they can strip out or trim down, such as the amount of information needed to enable the speediest credit assessment. The non-major will also be redesigning and simplifying its loan contracts, document packs and templates.
Coulter also told Australian Broker that CUA has plans to enhance its document management services for brokers.
“Another thing which will really benefit brokers is around document management services. The solution we are implementing supports all inbound and outbound documentation throughout the home loan process, but also more importantly from a broker perspective, we have now got enhanced messaging between CUA, the customer and the broker. That will really enhance the broker’s experience as they will have much greater visibility in regards to the status of home loans.
“In actual fact, brokers will feel the need to contact our CUA BDMs less because, from a system perspective, they will have full visibility in terms of what stage the application is at. We have also got things like electronic signatures and electronic storage and retrieval of documents.
“Brokers were really important to us when we were putting this all together so we have really tried to ensure we make the experience better for our brokers as well as our customers.”
