Mortgage ad targets digitally-savvy borrowers

Fintech mortgage platform uno., which won the backing of Westpac in September, recently launched an ad campaign aimed at generating awareness of the company’s brand among the “large and growing number of people who want getting a mortgage to be digital”.

The ad suggests that consumers wouldn’t buy a house without seeing all the rooms, and likewise, they shouldn’t take out a home loan without seeing all the rates on offer. It states: “At uno home loans, we’ll show you rates you may not be seeing”. 

Explaining the tag line, founder and CEO Vincent Turner emphasised to Mortgage Business that the ad is not intended to suggest that some mortgage professionals are secretive when it comes to revealing all available home loan rates, adding: “The customers we’re going after, our observation is that they want service and advice digitally and not face to face.

“That group of customers is not well-serviced by a more traditional mortgage broker, so we’ve put a lot of effort into building technology that allows consumers to have a digital experience when they deal with us,” he added.

“I think ultimately there are different brokers with different propositions who service different types of customers, and we're here to service a particular kind of customer that has a digital desire or digital preference,” Mr Turner explained.

“Everything else they’re doing is digital, they don’t really want to go and see someone, and they don’t really want someone to come to their home,” he said.

Mr Turner also noted that while this type of behaviour is thought to be more typical of younger consumers, busy professionals of all ages are becoming increasingly time poor. As such, he suggested that they would prefer not to have a financial services professional actively calling them.

He said: “They’re starting to experience a digital service proposition in a lot of other things that they deal with, and once they’ve used mobile banking [and Uber] and done all these other things digitally, they start to think ‘Well why would my mortgage be any different?’

“The difference between a traditional broker and uno. is that the traditional broker is like ‘give me a call’ and we’re like ‘don’t give us a call’.”

Despite the growth of fintech groups such as these, the proportion of home loans coming through the broker channel has steadily increased in recent years, with more than 53 per cent of mortgages now coming through the third-party channel, which is tipped to increase further.

[Related: Digital mortgage service wins major bank's backing]