Perpetual launches mortgage market warning signal

 Perpetual Corporate Trust’s new Mortgage Market Insights module seeks to provide lenders, as well as other financial services providers, the ability to analyse the performance of their portfolios and benchmark them against the broader Australian mortgage market, worth $200 billion.

Richard McCarthy, acting group executive for Perpetual, claims that the module, built using Microsoft Azure and Power BI, “affords a level of transparency never before available to the sector”.

It generates mortgage market predictions, the accuracy of which will improve over time through the use of machine learning, according to Mr McCarthy.  

“It offers greater control through early warning signs about potential issues, and uses modelling to predict the future performance of the mortgage market,” the Perpetual acting group executive said.

“The platform creates efficiency and scale, moving organisations well beyond spreadsheets and enabling greater comparability in the market.”

Commenting on the Mortgage Market Insights module, Microsoft Australia’s CTO, Lee Hickin, said: “Critically, the Perpetual platform informs decision making, directs strategy, and offers an additional line of defence for the banking and financial services industry through data driven insights.

“It can detect potential problems and highlight warning signs that previously weren’t visible until it was too late to act.”

The module is part of Perpetual’s Business Intelligence (BI) platform, which provides a number of modules to help financial services providers meet their regulatory and compliance reporting requirements. It combines Perpetual’s proprietary data with those from external sources and analyses them for patterns that could help reduce the risk of home loan default and financial loss.

Also newly added to the platform is the Credit Stress Testing module, aimed at helping financial services providers streamline reporting to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority by enabling “easy stress testing of portfolios”.

Perpetual’s new IFRS 9 module, meanwhile, automates compliance reporting for the new global accounting standard that came into effect earlier this year.

Without mentioning names, Perpetual said one of the big four banks, two mutual banks, and one “neo-bank” are some of the early adopters of its BI platform.

[Related: Emerging lender signs on to open banking API]