Speaking to Specialist Lending Solutions, Anth Mooney (pictured), Vida Homeloans’ CEO, said it had started to deploy AI within the business, including an AI-powered assistant called Mobi, which was launched in July after a six-week build.
He explained: “It’s a small language model that has all of our rules, data, everything we know about mortgages and effectively we’ve deployed that to brokers. They’ve got a sort of 24/7 criteria search engine put it that way.”
Mooney said that since it launched in July, Mobi has answered over 21,000 broker queries.
“What we’ve been quite surprised at is the level of engagement with it, the willingness of brokers to use it, because we thought they would be a little sceptical, but they’re getting an instant, detailed answer that is almost always correct.
“The accuracy rate is way higher than you would get with a human, and our humans are excellent at what they do, but there’s no way we could give those instant responses. It would take us 20 minutes to go away, work out the answer and ring them back. They’re getting it in a nanosecond,” he said.
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Mooney said the development of this tool was possible due to securing its banking licence.
“That’s just something that we wouldn’t have been able to do 12 months ago. We would have liked to, but we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It saves the brokers a lot of time, and saves us a lot of time, but it augments that, so it didn’t replace anything… it just makes it a lot better,” he noted.
Mooney said Vida Homeloans is exploring several AI-based solutions, including voice technology, exploring opportunities to leverage Voice AI to streamline broker interactions by enabling natural communication for queries and tasks such as policy enquiries and application updates.
However, he was keen to say it was “not doing it to take people out of our business” but to “improve the overall broker service.”
AI should ‘augment’ the human underwriter
Mooney said that given conversations he was having with other mortgage lenders, they were “looking at AI through that efficiency and automation lens”.
“The way we see it is… deploying AI tools to augment the role of the underwriter. There’s a lot of time spent by individual underwriters undertaking admin tasks, and writing down in some detail the justification for why we’ve accepted a given case.
“What AI definitely can do is a lot of the heavy lifting in that space and then leave the judgment and the skill and the application of underwriting experience that can be applied more broadly to more cases, because the guys have just got less of an administrative burden to cope with,” he said.
Mooney said Vida Homeloans didn’t see AI as an opportunity to eradicate human underwriting, but to “turbocharge” it.
“I think AI can have imagination, I think we’ll all begin to see that over the next couple of years. Large language models can consume any amount of unstructured and structured data, but it’s their ability to learn and refine their decision-making over time that will actually make a difference in the mortgage market.
“I think anyone who thinks the mortgage market is going to look the same… in 10 years’ time, and just be a bit more automated, I think is kind of missing the point. This will bring a fundamental shift in the way that consumers behave and the way that lenders and brokers have to interact with their customers,” he said.
