Fintech Lendi Group targets homeowners with new tech

Fintech Lendi Group aims to win over Australia’s underserved homebuyers market with new tech as it evolves from a home loan app to a home ownership experience.

Lendi Group CEO and co-founder David Hyman

Fintech business Lendi Group is launching a host of new tech features for homeowners as it con­tinues to disrupt the vendor-dominated housing market.

The home-buying specialist, which boasts four million customers, a 6 per cent share of the home loan market and owns the Aussie Home Loans business including 237 physical stores, aims to win over Australia’s underserved buyers market as it evolves from a home loan app to a home ownership experience.

“We’re one of the only markets in the world, and certainly within the top 20 economies, that has no buyer’s agent market,” said Lendi Group chief executive and co-founder David Hyman.

“In the US market, 85 per cent of transactions are handled by buyers’ agents and other markets have a 20 to 50 per cent penetration rate, whereas Australia is around 3 per cent – so there’s a ­really big opportunity to create great digital experiences dedicated to home buyers.

“We want to help our cus­tomers go from just being very good at the transactional home loan component to being much more experiential around the home buying and home ownership journey.”

Lendi Group plans to launch a host of new features to cater to homebuyers, including a live equity tracker, which will enable customers to track the live value of their home to provide a real time snapshot of their equity.

The tracker will sit within the Aussie Home Loans app, which the business launched earlier this year and is seeing “start-up-esque growth rates”.

“We are seeing double and ­triple-digit month-on-month growth with that product,” said Mr Hyman who declined to share numbers. “We are seeing thousands and thousands of downloads a week and 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the people who are downloading the app are actually signing up to become an Aussie customer.

“It’s early days but we’re seeing incredibly good retention rates of those customers who are actually signing up for an account, so it’s becoming a key part of our engagement experience. We haven’t even launched it. We’ve not done a single ad, it’s all happening organically.”

Mr Hyman said the business was seeing strong results from applying the digital technology that is built for the digital-only Lendi brand to the Aussie Home Loans brand to help bolster its digital experience.

“What we’re seeing is that the technology that we built through Lendi, when it’s branded Aussie and delivered to the Aussie customer it actually resonates incredibly well. What we’ve been able to do, from a strategic perspective, is we’ve started to bifurcate the ­experiences and really lean into Aussie as a new kind of digital ­omnichannel experience.

“So Lendi will cater to digital native customers who are happy to deal predominantly in digital with text and chat-based contact for predominantly simpler transactions like refinancing, whereas Aussie will be the brand for everyone that is a great digital experience backed up by the human touch.”

Mr Hyman said these experiences would help evolve the Lendi brand into “edgier segments” as AI technology matures.

“We’ve got a pretty big investment in AI across the whole organisation and that will be the next revolutionary wave around the customer experience, as chat-based interfaces expand.”

With Lendi Group housing both the Lendi and Aussie brands on one operating platform and tech stack, the business is able to create and grow two different brand experiences while ensuring a deep specialist focus on one sector. Mr Hyman believes this is where Lendi, like many popular fintechs, is creating most value.

“The most successful fintechs have been very focused on a particular segment and going really deep into a particular vertical. We’ve been very focused on home loans and that’s a very complicated space in the Australian market and we’re now going deeper and deeper into the experience,” he said.

However, unlike most fintechs, Lendi also has the ability to create an omnichannel brand experience through Aussie.

“As a pure play digital business that acquired a traditional bricks and mortar business, we’ve been able to leverage the best of both worlds. We have digital and growth at our core, but we also have this amazing distribution network with 237 stores around the country and 1300 brokers across the network. That’s something that’s very difficult to build as a digital business. It’s not about in person or retail or digital, you can actually combine those two and if you get it right it actually ­becomes a superpower.”