Fintech lender hits back at 86 400 comments

On Thursday (18 July), digital neo-lender 86 400 was granted a full authorised deposit-taking institution licence by APRA and said it expects to launch its mortgage offering in the next three months.

Speaking to Mortgage Business at the time, CEO Robert Bell revealed that the lender was “about two to three months away from launching [its] mortgage products” and would be “focusing entirely on mortgage brokers” for its home loan distribution.

He said: “With the number of people that go through mortgage brokers, it is the obvious place to start.

“We don’t think anyone has really solved a direct digital home loan yet – it will probably happen in the future – but we see brokers as absolutely critical to our success and that is why we’re starting with brokers.”

However, the founder and CEO of Adelaide-based fintech Tic:Toc, Anthony Baum, contacted Mortgage Business to highlight that it was offering digital mortgages already.

Mr Baum hit back at Mr Bell’s comment that no one had “really solved a direct digital home loan yet”, stating it was “not accurate”.

“From a customer starting an application, to completing their application, being approved and having their home loan documentation emailed to them in their inbox, that all can be completed in 58 minutes or less, without any paper within the process.

“If that is not digital, I do not know what digital is; and Tic:Toc has already achieved that for its customers,” he said.

Mr Baum said that the lender was striving to make the approval process “faster all the time” and “regularly provide[s] approval within a day without any physical documentation being required through [the] digital technology and digital validation processes”.

“We’re really excited by that, and we find it frustrating that people still reference that digital is not done, or is not possible for home loans yet – whether that be holistically, in Tic:Toc’s case, or in part (in terms of validation of financial position). Because we do it every day,” he said.

Mr Baum therefore reiterated that the platform had the capacity to digitally validate and value property, identity, financial position and produce documents “without any human intervention”. 

However, he acknowledged that “the reality is, in the home loan space, virtually all customers will require a small amount of human intervention when [loans are] associated on an exception basis [to the credit policy].

“With rules that identify through the displayable output from the AI and decisioning capability we have, some of these things will need to be looked at, but they can be addressed by a human exception basis and then the rest of the process is fully digital,” he explained.

Mr Baum concluded: “It can be done. We have the technology to do that and, certainly, our technology means that a significant amount of the home loans we approve have no paper involved whatsoever. Documentation that was supplied by the customer previously in a paper form can now all be done through the digital data sources we access. So, if that’s not digital, we don’t know what is.”

To date, Tic:Toc has reportedly assessed $3 billion of home loans, with approximately a quarter of these having been settled.

The fintech recently partnered with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to enable it to access its proprietary technology to power the bank’s own instant home loan platform.

Bendigo announced the launch of its Bendigo Express “instant” while label home loan product, facilitated by digital lending platform Tic:Toc, in February.

[Related: Bendigo launches fully digitised home loan]