The tech tools that give brokers the edge

Digital technology, including artificial intelligence, is revolutionising the mortgage and finance industry and brokers are at the forefront of using these tools to enhance efficiency, save time and boost business growth.

Reflecting the theme of “Hello Future”, the MFAA 2024 National Conference held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on July 25 had a distinct focus on AI.

Artificial intelligence and other innovations such as open banking are assisting brokers in their day-to-day work, helping them to build new opportunities and adapt quickly in a fast-moving market.

A broker panel discussion, titled “Hello Possibility: Broker efficiency through AI and Tech – the why, what and how of streamlining your business process”, featured two Melbourne brokers, Sadish Visvalingam (pictured above left), founder and senior finance broker at Premier Financial Advocates, and Chris Borg (pictured above right), director and founder of Borg Financial.

Also joining the panel was Renee Blethyn (pictured above centre), head of broker partnerships at lending technology provider Next Gen, who spoke about NextGen’s open banking solution, which includes a groundbreaking AI generated income detection tool.

Businesswoman and scientific futurist Associate Professor Dr Catherine Ball hosted the panel.

The MFAA national conference attracted hundreds of members from across Australia eager to learn, network and celebrate the top performers in the industry at the MFAA National Excellence Awards held following the conclusion of the conference.

AI as a time-saving and efficiency tool

Visvalingam gave conference attendees a rundown of how he used generative AI tool ChatGPT on a daily basis. He prefaced his presentation by providing some information on his background.

“I moved to Australia in 2006 as an immigrant from Sri Lanka,” Visvalingam said.

“When I moved to Australia one of the biggest challenges I faced is how to be an effective communicator. My first language is Sinhalese, second would be Tamil and English was going to be the third one.”

Visvalingam said it took some time to get his head around how to communicate effectively using three languages. “It was challenging.”

He said he wanted to show the audience how he used AI to be productive, efficient and effective.

“My goal for you today is to show you how I use AI in my business in order to do 10 hours’ worth of work in 15 minutes.”

Visvalingam said before using any AI the key was to prime it, whether starting loan applications, writing emails, making social media content or talking to backbook clients.

“Priming your ChatGPT means you teach your AI about yourself, about your business, your goals, your objectives, your vision, your mission, your values. How do you generate income and most importantly what you want the outcomes to be?

“In my business, my ChatGPT primer is about seven pages and if you take time to do this properly, your outcomes will be better.”

Information Visvalingam had added into his primer included his name, company name, base of operation, field of expertise, primary clients, income streams, marketing strategy, and business objectives and main outcomes.

He said once the primer was complete, writing a prompt was the next important step. For example, if writing comments for applications, the prompt would be telling ChatGPT to be a mortgage broker analyst.

“My prompt will be something like this: ‘For the next question I ask you are required to answer them as a finance broker analyst in Australia, please make [sure] the answers you provide are meeting NCCP and best interests duty guidelines’.”

Once the primer and prompt was completed ChatGPT was ready to write comments. Visvalingam said while it would normally take brokers 40 to 50 minutes to write application comments, ChatGPT did it in less than 10 seconds.

However, he warned brokers not to just cut and paste from ChatGPT, but also to ensure they amended the comments.

If brokers didn’t like the comments or wanted something to be mitigated, they could also ask ChatGPT to do that – for example, it could provide 10 mitigants as to why a client had a lower HEM figure.

“The key here is to make sure you have a conversation with your client, find out what’s more suitable for your client, then use that accordingly,” Visvalingam said. “This [AI]  is only a resource for you.”

The golden rule was to never input customers’ private information into ChatGPT. “We are always using general information.”

AI can also be used to very quickly write bulk emails to send out to clients, for example, using five different scenarios. Visvalingam said he was even able to do this task on his mobile phone and then have the emails ready to send when started work.

In an email to a client about a loan approval, Visvalingam asked ChatGPT to add the next steps from approval to funding and it was able to do that because he had educated the AI at the primer stage.

He also showed the attendees how AI could create 20 social medial reels for him in less than four minutes. “Firstly, I am asking ChatGPT to be world-class content creator for mortgage brokers.”

Then through the prompt, he asked it to create social media content on reasons to use a mortgage broker, using a specific template with different tables which he could then enter into Canva to create two different types of reels.

Visvalingam also spoke about using an SMS bot to mimic a human being and work as an appointment setter for clients. “I struggled with three languages in 2006 and now I have a bot that speaks up to 80 languages.

“AI is not going to replace humans but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI,” he said.

My Virtual Broker

Borg, who set up his brokerage, Borg Financial, five years ago, said he realised there was a major gap when it came to scalability in brokerages and aggregators.

“It’s an industry where we have to spend and invest a lot of time in staff in order to scale our business to be profitable and to offer that service to our clients,” said Borg.

In February 2024, Borg and business partner Jens Pistorius and CTO and lead developer Mikael Schirru started My Virtual Broker.

“We realised there’s a massive space for us to be able to utilise AI and essentially build a fintech that would enable you to not utilise as much admin as most people are using right now,” said Borg.

The cost of offshore staff had risen and much investment went into training personnel to make sure they were competent.

‘They work eight hours a day, not 365 days a year, you obviously need breaks. An AI works 24/7, 365 days, it doesn’t need to be trained, it’s already trained and it’s consistently learning.”

Borg said he was inspired by the 2008 film Iron Man,  which featured a fully autonomous AI named Jarvis, which Tony Stark utilised to build equipment and control his Iron Man suit. “Having an AI was something I wanted to implement in my business.”

He went on to show the conference audience the My Virtual Broker prototype which could submit a loan deal from any CRM platform, all the way from lead generation and initial data capture to a submission with AOL “when the button is pressed and the documents are uploaded” in just 10 minutes.

Borg showed a video that followed the progress of an application through My Virtual Broker, using dummy data. The process had been slowed down 800 times so people could see it in operation.

Called Dante, Borg said the AI had the capability to move through the internet and capture and fill in data, such as a fact find, learning from these very specific tasks.

“The bot does not replace the broker. I want to be very clear about that. The AI is there to support and be used as a tool in order for your day-to-day tasks to be completed and you can actually work with the client.”

ChatGPT was built into the system, which included many different AIs. My Virtual Broker could also order property valuations from CoreLogic, select the loan products for product comparison and do bank pricing.

Borg said it was also able to access third-party applications, fill out the data from the CRM, download the servicing calculator and upload it to the CRM.

It could also scan bankstatements.com and calculate living expenses, upload all final loan documents to AOL, categorise and verify them.

“The capability of the AI is forever learning. This is a prototype, it’s in its infancy. We’re at the forefront of the fifth industrial revolution.”

Echoing Visvalingam, Borg said the work of the AI still needed to be checked by humans

He said the advantages of My Virtual Broker included seamlessness, lower costs, quicker turnaround times and freeing up brokers’ time so they could spend it with their clients.

Open banking and the Financial Passport

Blethyn, the head of broker partnerships at NextGen, spoke about the tech provider’s Frollo Financial Passport open banking platform which is available through ApplyOnline.

“We believe open banking is the safest way for you to be able to work with your clients for them to be able to share data with you and then sharing that with lenders to enable a smooth transaction process,” Blethyn said.

The Financial Passport has three components – NextGenID, Access Seeker and open banking.

Blethyn said NextGen's open banking solution leverages CDR data to provide mortgage brokers with comprehensive financial insights on their clients for home loan applications.

Blethyn played a video of a Sydney broker who had previously used a different technology service to collect financial data but switched to NextGen’s open banking service for a better experience. The system was also improved based on her feedback.

The broker praised the speed, accuracy and data safety of NextGen’s open banking service.

One of the new features added to the Frollo Financial Passport ‘Insights Report’, which Blethyn announced at the conference, was income regularity scores for clients. This leverages powerful AI models to transform complex sets of information into easy-to-understand metrics to help assess income.

The scores measure the consistency and stability of an applicant's employment income streams across three dimensions; amount consistency, payment regularity and payment longevity.

"This new income verification capability represents a significant leap forward in how we use open banking data," Blethyn stated. "It's another time- saving tool to assist mortgage brokers, making the process faster and more accurate than ever before".

Blethyn said some brokers using its open banking service were not tech-savvy but liked it because of  the richness of the data it provided. “It’s providing a better picture than what brokers are getting from using other services.”