Australia’s Nano Digital Home Loans sets its sights on overseas borrowers

An Australian start-up capable of approving home loans in less than 10 minutes has set its sights on Britain and the US.

Nano’s algorithms check data’s accuracy as it’s coming in.

An Australian digital home loan company that can approve new applicants in under 10 minutes will expand into Britain, after nabbing a deal allowing it to sell its software via the world’s largest enterprise software platform.

Nano Digital Home Loans has signed a deal with Salesforce to sell its software among hundreds of other software-as-a-service (SaaS) products available on the platform.

Digital home-loan products are on the rise in Australia. Nano landed a deal to license its software to AMP in May this year. At the same time, CBA launched its own digital home loan product called Unloan, and Westpac and Defence Bank have released similar products.

Nano co-founder Andrew Walker believes his start-up’s product will take foreign markets by storm.

“For us, being able to get this distribution deal signed with Salesforce, it gives us a global reach and across their platform, and it allows us to scale our software in an accelerated way,” he said.

“Salesforce is the biggest company that a lot of people have never heard of.”

Mr Walker said the deal would allow Nano to work foreign markets without having to get “boots on the ground” and open offices. Instead, it would focus on building relationships and leveraging Salesforce’s existing client database.

“By this time next year we’d hope to have three or four more local partners in Australia and three or four in the UK, and one or two in Canada,” he said.

Andrew Walker, co-founder and chief executive of Nano.

Mr Walker said Nano was close to landing a deal with another Australian bank and a UK bank, and this would be announced in coming months.

While Defence Bank claims to be able to approve an applicant for a home loan in 30 seconds, Mr Walker said that process still required borrowers to manually upload documents – whereas Nano’s platform was completely digital.

“We’ve written the algorithms that check the data as it’s coming in. We use bank scraping in Australia, we open banking rails in different countries around the world and we go to source information to make underwriting decisions so we don’t require people to send in bank statements (or) pay slips as we can source the data from transaction reports,” he said.

“Our algorithms do the calculations of income and expenses.”

Mr Walker said the goal behind Nano was to innovate was traditionally a long, drawn-out process which often resulted in buyers missing out on properties.

“People were still writing mortgages the same way they had for the last 40 years. We wanted to completely reinvent the ways they are done,” he said.

“There’s no reason that a mortgage broker should take three weeks to get a loan approved when we can do it in 10 minutes.”

Joseph Lam travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.