Digital mortgage: lending transformation for a major retail bank

FINANCIAL SERVICES  ·  TECHNOLOGY  ·  LENDING

The situation

A major retail bank faced a fast-shifting mortgage market: rising rates, a wave of broker-led refinancing, and fintech entrants with better digital journeys. Lender productivity was bottlenecked by duplicate front-office origination systems and siloed contact tools. A lack of end-to-end visibility drove call volumes and left the bank exposed to drop-outs during refinancing. More than half of annual secured technology funding went simply to running rigid on-premise legacy systems.

The work

We designed an integrated digital mortgage strategy to turn product-centric applications into a single customer-centric journey.

  • Hollowed the legacy core using a strangler approach, migrating custom logic into cloud-hosted microservices.

  • Stood up a secure, cloud-native API gateway to decouple loan engines and prepare for integration with property and aggregator platforms.

  • Built broker portals and decision-in-principle interfaces that removed manual re-keying, with intelligent underwriting using document recognition for income and automated valuations to fast-track low-risk applications.

  • Launched mobile-first onboarding with digital identity checks, live status, and in-app support, and consolidated contact history into a single customer view for proactive retention.

The outcome

  • Mortgage flow protected, with each one per cent of market share worth an estimated one hundred to one hundred and twenty million dollars in net interest margin.

  • Straight-through processing targeted above fifty per cent, cutting cost to serve.

  • Time from application to offer brought under twenty-four hours for mainstream risk.