Regional Australia Bank have partnered with Basiq to provide input into a newly released Affordability Report, a new innovative new tool for their home lending specialists and customers. Rather than spending time requesting pay slips, credit card and bank statements the lender can spend more time where it matters most, understanding the needs of the customer and developing a relationship with the customer based on transparency and trust.
This is great news for customers as they will no longer have to gather income and expense information and send it to the lenders or try to recall private financial information over the phone. Automated income and expense verification means hours are saved during the home loan process and a much more seamless loan application experience for customers.
According to the Australia Financial Review, Banks have traditionally used the ‘Household Expenditure Measure’ (HEM) as a default measure of spending. In fact, according to financial data provided by UBS, 70-80 percent of all 2017 home loans in Australia use the HEM benchmark instead of declared or verified expense analysis.
Rather than using the HEM benchmark, Regional Australia Bank home lending specialists can now use actual amounts for living expenses based on real bank transaction data. They use this information to help establish immediate trust and transparency with the customer. Given that a customer’s income and expenses will be appropriately categorised, it means that they don’t have to ask personal questions that can’t easily be answered.
The collaboration puts Regional Australia Bank in the unique position to take advantage of Basiq’s Open Banking platform when the Banking API’s become publicly available. They are already taking advantage of bank transaction data and in the future, they will be able to provide a better customer experience and make better and more responsible decisions by using aggregated information across all of their customers’ bank accounts.
