Online Mortgage Platform Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2015 - Winner

Mortgage lending in Russia presents a number of challenges both for customers and banks offering mortgage products. For a customer filing for a mortgage loan is a tiresome, time-, effort- and resources consuming process, at the end of which a customer is offered a high interest rate form a bank. The whole process is not streamlined and badly organized as customer needs to contact a whole range of companies in the process (insurers, appraisers, real estate agents, developers, notaries, etc.) and file different set of documents with each application to each bank. Banks spend a lot of money on marketing to attract a customer who takes a mortgage loan once or twice in their life which translates into a high interest rate for a customer. Banks, developers and other mortgage market players spend enormous money on advertising, offices and employees. All of them compete for one customer who will finally buy one apartment and take a mortgage loan in one bank. The winner will be also one, but money will be spent by all. Tinkoff Bank operates in the daily banking segment – we know how to acquire customers, and invest a lot in the customer experience. That is why we have taken a function of acquiring customers for mortgage banks. We have made a uniform mortgage platform linking customers and mortgage banks to streamline the whole mortgage application process, bring it online and make it cheaper and more convenient for the customer. In the process of the platform development we drew inspiration from online marketplaces. All the customer needs to take advantage of Tinkoff Bank’s mortgage platform is simply contact the bank’s call centre or file an online application. Tinkoff Bank will screen the market based on the customer’s needs and borrowing capacity, select the most suitable product among those offered by partner banks, and negotiate the deal terms. After that, the customer can close the deal with the partner bank. Tinkoff Bank will do all the work with appraisers, insurers, and partner banks without charging the customer any service fee. All these services are free for the customer which makes our product the only one at the market offering such online streamlined services for free as brokers change a commission from a customer. This is an ideal synergy and a win-win situation where Tinkoff Bank receives commission fees from partner banks for each deal, partner banks acquire customers and cut down on acquisition costs, and customers obtain loans at lower interest rates and a simple streamlined online customer experience.