NewTech Friday: Oper – Enabling digital mortgages
Geert Van Kerckhoven is the CEO and Co-Founder of Oper, a Dutch fintech that is reinventing mortgage lending. He tells Qorus about the company and his belief that getting a mortgage should take just a few clicks from the comfort of your home.
Geert Van Kerckhoven is the CEO and Co-Founder of Oper, a Dutch fintech that is reinventing mortgage lending. He tells Qorus about the company and his belief that getting a mortgage should take just a few clicks from the comfort of your home.
What led to the creation of Oper?
We created Oper because we believe the European mortgage business has reached its ‘Waze / Google Maps’ moment. Borrowers are ready to throw away their Michelin map and embrace a new way of interacting with their bank. However, taking up a mortgage is a significant transaction. You can't replicate the Waze experience by uploading a PDF from your physical map to your website. Unfortunately, we saw too many banks do just this for mortgage acquisition. Their experience taught us that shifting from branch-based to digital sales requires a full paradigm shift. One that only new technologies can drive.
Secondly, perhaps paradoxically, we identified European regulations as an accelerator for Oper. Starting with the Mortgage Credit Directive and increasingly with the subsequent EBA guidelines, the EU has been actively pushing for harmonization throughout the Union. This not only created a gigantic market for new technology, but also paved the way for digital mortgage advice and creditworthiness assessments.
In parallel to changing customer behavior and supported by regulations enabling European scale, we also saw an opportunity to position such a solution for the benefit of lenders, as opposed to against lenders. The market for technology talent is scarce, a trend that encourages lenders to favor buying software over building. So we had a customer need, a scalable platform, and a cost advantage.
The founding team (with +20 years of experience in fintech) returned to first principles and redesigned a digital mortgage journey from scratch.
Could you present Oper's offer?
Today we offer large mortgage brokers and banks a turn-key distribution solution for mortgage loans. Our offer consists of four modules:
Borrowing facing journey builder: This allows lenders to build a digital journey for their clients from the first contact (simulation) until the signing of the mortgage offer. A lender can embed the journey builder easily into its website or e-banking.
Oper’s digital advisory portal: This enables client centers to take over mortgage cases when required, and provide advice remotely and face to face. In combination with the journey builder, the advisory portal enables hybrid customer journeys.
Channel manager for lenders' back office: This allows lenders to maintain pricing, acceptance criteria, creditworthiness checks and case management across distribution channels. The channel manager has an API-first approach allowing for easy connection of brokers, affiliate partners and other systems.
Smart data collector: Lastly, our smart data collector supports the modules above in creating a data-driven credit profile of the borrower and the property.
What's coming next for Oper?
A digital mortgage is not the same as an online mortgage. Today, too much paper evidence creates manual work. With most online mortgage processes there's a collection of paper documents to get the loan approved. In a digital world, this paper process shouldn't exist. That's why we invest much of our time creating a paperless/PDF-less mortgage process. We use open data sources (PSD2, payroll data, property valuation data, eGovernment data, etc.) to generate a validated creditworthiness assessment of the client. Such an assessment enables a real-time client image and can speed up processes and reduce costs. Today, our solutions are already decreasing 40% of the workload and creating an approval 80% faster.
We will extend these solutions beyond our core markets in the next few months. This way, we can enable digital mortgages at scale across Europe.
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