"[The pandemic] kind of pushed more people online and helped people adapt to this new model"
While grinding the global financial system to essentially a full stop, the COVID-19 crisis proved to be a boon for Canada's mortgage technology companies.
Joseph Buaron, co-founder and digital loans platform GoPeer, said that far from discouraging Canadians to conduct transactions, the lockdowns and social restrictions increased public awareness of online financial channels.
“[The pandemic] kind of pushed more people online and helped people adapt to this new model. At the time, people were still more comfortable going in person,” Buaron told Canadian Mortgage Professional.
“Even though they typically didn’t like doing things and waiting weeks for it to happen, they weren’t as familiar with the online lending approach. That’s changed significantly with COVID,” he added. “The other thing was that one of the concerns was defaults increasing with people losing their jobs. It seems like there was the opposite effect because of the government aid – fewer people [were] defaulting, so it helped us on both sides there.”
Read more: How technology is changing the mortgage industry
The flourishing of fintech has also benefited clients and industry players alike.
FundMore.ai is aimed at helping lenders streamline their operations through automation – a solution that CEO and co-founder Chris Grimes said is a perfect fit for the needs of the often tortuous funding process.
“We don’t remove underwriters from the process, but we do enhance their decision by coming back to them with a recommendation for an approval, decline, or potentially a further review – but with very clear narratives,” Grimes said.
“The way we’ve designed the decision engine was to assist at either a branch level or at a centralized underwriting centre so that you’d have consistency across the entire spectrum by making a recommendation, and then giving them all the reasons why that recommendation was [made].”
