His aim is to boost offering to clients
NextGen is embracing digital innovation and to strengthen its role as a mortgage finance technology leader, Mike Ponsonby (pictured) has been appointed to a key leadership role.
Ponsonby, who has been an account executive at NextGen for four years, has been promoted to head of customer partnerships. He will focus on supporting NextGen customers and overseeing its portfolio of major banks, non-bank lenders and broker groups across the industry.
Ponsonby will lead a team of customer account executives as NextGen introduces big enhancements to its flagship ApplyOnline platform and capitalises on open banking, set to revolutionise data sharing and the loan application process for lenders, brokers and their clients.
Reporting directly to NextGen chief customer officer Tony Carn, Ponsonby has more than 20 years of experience in the mortgage industry, bringing a wealth of product, strategy and distribution knowledge to the role.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time for NextGen and this role is a great opportunity for me to harness our market insights and work together with all of our customers to ensure they are equipped with the latest in technology offerings to make lending easy and create the best outcomes for customers,” Ponsonby said.
“We take very much a consultative approach to how we work with our lender partners and our strategic broker groups.
“Apart from our platform, our capability really comes from the knowledge and technical SME information that we bring to the market.”
Ponsonby said NextGen processes more than a million loan applications per year and helps Australians achieve their dreams of home ownership, so takes its role very seriously.
“It’s really important for lenders to understand the capabilities of our platform that drive the quality at point of sale and also create a great customer experience,” he said.
“A great customer experience is about supporting brokers to be as successful as possible and helping provide their own customers a great experience when they’re looking to buy or refinance their home.”
Ponsonby said NextGen can provide a wide range of unique features for lenders to support brokers, including digital variations, e-signatures and identification verification, streamlining customer information in the most efficient way.
He said there are three key areas driving point of sale efficiency – the automated process of receipt of the data, enabling credit policy to support the customer experience lenders offer brokers, and process efficiency.
“That can include work streaming applications directly to the right assessors at the right time with the right skill level so lenders can try to fast-track applications.
“We’re working quite closely with lenders around improving ‘time to yes’ and starting to bring to life approvals in hours.”
Ponsonby said he and his team work with lender partners to understand their aspirations.
“Is it market growth, is it speed, is it customer experience, targeting a certain segment of the market? We work really closely with them to improve things such as data validation and automation, efficiencies around collecting customer information and completing compliance requirements so they can achieve a faster turnaround,” he explained.
“It’s also about creating a great broker group experience, so lenders are living up to the ideal that brokers are after.”
Ponsonby said more and more NextGen customers now wanted to adapt their processes to fit the best form of technology and this could be achieved through automation, data aggregation and pre-population of data from third parties.
Ponsonby’s appointment comes at a perfect time, as NextGen looks to deliver open banking solutions through ApplyOnline.
“Utilising open banking in the lending process can eliminate some major pain points for lenders, brokers and borrowers. This is the largest single change within our industry in many years and NextGen’s open banking solution will help deliver an even more efficient experience for our customers,” Ponsonby said.
“Open banking later this year will form a new behaviour and a whole new way of applying for a home loan.”
Ponsonby said tech innovation and open banking will remove the need to collect customer information through a manual, time-consuming process and make home loans within hours a market norm.
NextGen chief customer officer Tony Carn said Ponsonby’s appointment will elevate the company’s strategic customer partnerships.
“This year our goal is to continue our growth trajectory fuelled by exciting new product developments through open banking,” Carn said.
“With a strong product background and a deep understanding of industry benchmarking and process optimisation, Mike will play a key role in servicing our volumes, as well as supporting our customers as they increasingly digitise to achieve straight-through processing, which will include onboarding with open banking capabilities.”
