Online lending platform launched for brokers and lenders
A Melbourne-based fintech company has launched a new online home loan application platform aimed at minimising friction in the home loan process.
Nimo Industries has announced the launch of a “software as a service” (SaaS) platform for brokers and lenders that enables them to service home loan customers online.
CEO Peter Jones said the platform aims to minimise friction in the home loan process, as well as reduce loan approval times and the number of lost sales.
“Nimo allows financial institutions to prioritise customer experience without relying on costly and inflexible infrastructure or increasing backend operating costs,” he said.
“With Nimo, the creation of an online lending platform becomes a ‘buy’ decision, freeing up lenders’ internal ‘build’ capabilities to focus on more core business priorities. Internal complexity has traditionally been a barrier to meeting rapidly changing customer expectations, so by bringing in digital capability that is essentially ‘plug and play’, lenders can innovate quickly, start small, then scale and customise when they need to.”
According to Mr Jones, a broker could opt to install an “apply now” button on their website, which would lead their clients to the application form where the client could fill in their details.
It is designed to be used on a mobile phone and can be white-labelled for brokers.
“It’ll capture that upfront information that would help a broker to be able to look at a deal and then contact a client and have a conversation around what they can and cannot do based on the information provided,” Mr Jones told The Adviser.
“It enables the customer to put information in and for a lender to be able to receive information in a way that makes sense to them.”
Mr Jones said the fintech has used a “human-centred design approach” to ensure the information layout is suitable for lenders as well as the customers.
“Lenders like things to be delivered in a credit way, but customers like to give information in a different way. We’ve spent four years in coming up with a design that enables the customers to put information in, and for a lender to be able to receive information in a way that makes sense to them,” Mr Jones said.
He added that this design ensures the information received from the customer is accurate the first time.
“When they see a broker or a lender, they sometimes only have a limited amount of information on them. They then have to exchange emails, where everything could get lost in the email exchanges,” he said.
“This provides one platform where all that can be done in the one interaction.”
The applications can be connected to an aggregator’s CRM to avoid the broker having to lodge the application manually. According to Mr Jones, the process improves credit quality, data accuracy and speed, and avoids human errors.
“From the broker’s point of view, it gets the information from the customer in a really clean way and enables them to have a really good quality conversation with them,” he said.
“That’s the primary benefit. If they work with their aggregators to put it into their back-end CRM, then that’s a layer for the aggregators.”
The platform is built to support the National Consumer Credit Protection’s responsible lending compliance obligations. Customers are asked a range of questions around responsible lending, including unforeseen future changes, equity release considerations, debt consolidation considerations, refinance loan term and longer loan term considerations.
There are reports that Nimo Industries has launched a convertible note raising to raise money from potential investors.
The Adviser understands the purpose of the raise is to expand and accelerate the business into other regions such as the UK and Asia, and include additional functionalities in the platform going forward.