Start-up lender Nano hopes to attract the attention of borrowers in an intensely competitive mortgage market with a fully-featured redraw that will provide “a full bank replacement”.
Looking more like a transaction account, the Nano redraw will come with a Visa card, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Transactions will be unlimited and borrowers will be able to set up different redraw sub-accounts for different savings purposes.
Nano raised A$33 million in a Series A capital raising in May, funded entirely by New Zealand investor Bolton Equities, and plans to have its loans in the market in the first quarter next year. Ongoing lending will be funded through warehouse facilities.
The company’s founders are Andrew Walker and Chris Lumby, a couple of ex-Westpac executives.
Walker and Lumby have decided to bypass brokers and go straight to the consumer. The product set is prime and “super-prime” mortgages (available to borrowers with top credit scores).
Their decision to adopt a B2C model is based on their belief that they have a superior digital offering that will give deliver a great customer experience. It’s the sort of spin that a lot of fintechs use but Walker and Lumby believe they can back it up
They have been working with a bunch of tech companies, including Salesforce, AWS and Cloud Lending, to position their business “at the forefront of a new era of digital financial services.”
Walker said the digital offerings of most lenders are digitised versions of their manual systems, forced on them by their inability to move away from legacy systems, and still involve some manual processing.
The backbone of Nano platform is the Salesforce customer relationship management system. Its core ledger, Cloud Lending, sits on the CRM.
“New technology allows you to start with the customer, making the customer and not the product primary in your system,” he said.
Lumby said everything from the income and expense verification, credit records, customer identification, property valuation and onboarding is digital. There is no paper at any stage and no manual involvement in areas like underwriting.
A set of algorithms do all the assessment and decision-making.
“Our product is the first truly end to end mortgage that we are aware of in the market. We can process a loan much more quickly,” Lumby said.