ANZ Plus app’s home loan re-finance process is cloud native and tree-free
By Gregg Kirkpatrick and Chris Gavin
New technologies can sometimes be ‘deceptive’. By that we mean what the user sees on their screen might not be that new at all – rather, just a veneer over the top of an old manual process.
This has historically been the case with complicated products such as lending.
When we began to tackle the problem of introducing home loan applications within the ANZ Plus app we were determined to provide a coherent digital experience from the front to the back. Our aim was to transform the process from both a customer and developer perspective.
Since late 2023, customers using the ANZ Plus app have been able to refinance their home loans entirely within the app by simply clicking on the ‘loans’ icon. Behind this is a brand-new simplified paper-free workflow.
We think the transformative nature of this digital native experience speaks for itself, and this is just the first cut! Each of the redesigned processes were done as automation targets; with income assessments, title searches and valuations going to be completely automated in the short term (unless the customer requests human intervention).
This major development is a result of a robust set of principles widely publicised and well-enforced within the Plus development teams in Australia and New Zealand. We’d like to share the main ones with you that relate to customer experience and developer decisions.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
For the customer experience, the principles are as visible as the resulting app screens themselves (which always get input and attention from a diverse and broad group of stakeholders from the very beginning). This produces a robust set of principles that are widely publicised within the team and well-enforced - permeating all the mobile app screens.
We have picked a few of these to illustrate. We think they are great, and they are particular to delivering the app’s desired customer experience.
Financial wellbeing
This was foremost. Aside from the banking industry’s responsible lending requirements, we wanted to ensure that the app was helping customers make the most of their money. We want to encourage people to become savers based on our nine financial wellbeing principles.
No instructions necessary
We curate the app experience to make what is expected from the customer at each journey step as straightforward as possible.
Never ask twice
This doesn’t just apply to questions asked within our part of the app; this applies across all the information sources we have available as a bank. With the customer’s permission, we reuse information they have shared with us and our integration partners previously to reduce the admin burden. A simple example is the customer’s name, but we also present them with their existing accounts, their current residential address as the property to be refinanced, and liabilities (again with their permission) sourced from credit bureaus.
Data over documents
Lending is historically a document-heavy process, and we didn’t want to build a solution that just made paper applications into PDFs.
DEVELOPER DECISIONS
Principles driving the employee experience (technical and business) are typically not well-socialised and publicised. However, they are just as important as the principles that drive the customer experience; indeed, they support them.
They can also be more generally applicable and essential to our technology teams. The principles below may not be new in the tech field, but in hindsight, these particular ones drove some excellent outcomes for us.
Simplifying technology requires product and process simplification
The ANZ Plus app aims to simplify products to a small number of compelling propositions that customers love to use. Rather than re-implementing the complex cases that have grown around existing products over time, we re-imagined the product (and the customer experience). We were able to deliver on this vision by managing eligibility.
This has been instrumental in simplifying our technology while increasing our automation, including the ability to automate the most crucial part of our business – credit decisions. To ensure ongoing product simplicity, eligibility criteria will only be relaxed as we improve our automation.
Don’t chase sunk cost on technology decisions
The team of almost 50 engineers building the services for the join-the-bank and new lending experience inherited a workflow engine that provided some advantages around out-of-the-box support for specific banking scenarios.
While the engine provided a head-start in specific ways, such as the overall flow of the customer experience, we found it was also resistant to the innovation we wanted to drive here. Instead of compromising on this and other areas, we looked for a more suitable solution.
We found Temporal. While this provides no pre-built workflows it is highly flexible and robust and aligns better to ANZ Plus’s engineering-led mindset. Because Temporal is controlled via code and isn’t ‘configured,’ the teams building the new lending services were not constrained by their tools and could easily let go of wrong decisions imposed on them.
Plan for your automation constraints
Historical data within the bank was not collected with the foresight of future automation requirements. This means that a step a human currently performs in which they apply some judgement, for example they can talk to the customer and address any issues, may not support automation without some data improvement and development.
We had to carefully and closely analyse our existing data to see which customers were going to be held back by our new automated solution. Instead of putting manual processes in place to compensate for this, we controlled the market availability of the solution so that nobody was left out.
Only process steps that were part of the proposed solution that we needed more time to automate were given to people to perform. Increasing market availability and automating temporary manual processes are the priority areas for our upcoming releases.
Enforce Domain Driven Design to help teams operate independently
Services have been built around ‘domains’, and this has been strictly enforced as the services have grown. So, despite having to go as fast as possible, we have managed to maintain domain integrity. This means that the services become composable into other solutions.
Our property service, for example, does not need to know that it is part of a loan application to complete its function. It can perform address searches, property valuations, collateral assessments, and title searches for any other part of the organisation. This needed constant vigilance and enforcement down to individual API fields and how the mobile app coordinates these services to complete a loan application.
In conclusion, it was these eight principles that really stood out to us when we had the chance to reflect on our first significant delivery of the new ANZ Plus lending experience. We’re hoping they will hold us in good stead for the next tranche of changes our systems must embrace, including enabling new products and channels. The challenge, as always, will be to keep these principles front of mind.
Gregg is a Technology Product Owner at ANZ. He is currently working on the lending proposition for the ANZ Plus app.
Chris is the Domain Architect for home loans at ANZ.
This article contains general information only – it does not take into account your personal needs, financial circumstances and objectives, it does not constitute any offer or inducement to acquire products and services or is not an endorsement of any products and services. Any opinions or views expressed in the article may not necessarily be the opinions or views of the ANZ Group, and to the maximum extent permitted by law, the ANZ Group makes no representation and gives no warranty as to the accuracy, currency or completeness of any information contained.