Westpac To Offer A 10-Minute Mortgage
The bank is predicting a surge in refinancing.
The bank is predicting a surge in refinancing.
A technology revamp is set to allow the bank the ability to full approve digital mortgages in as little as 10 minutes. The move is part of Westpac’s long-term shift towards digital banking and a readiness for a potential boom in refinancing.
Today, the bank becomes the latest lender to announce a push into digital mortgage lending — a tightly contested area for banks and fintechs as they duke it out for quick approval times.
Westpac plans to launch a new process in the final quarter of the year which will allow w some customers to refinance through an automated system. At first, the offer will only be open to individual borrowers who are refinancing an owner-occupied loan, have 20% equity in the property and earn a PAYG income.
The technology uses data analytics to perform identity checks and credit assessments, the bank says it will be able to unconditionally approve some simple loan applications in 10 minutes and plans to roll out the offer to a wider range of customers in 2023.
Further, Westpac CEO Peter King told The Sydney Morning Herald that customers are seeing the need to respond to the rising interest rates.
“Interest rates are no longer falling, they’re going up. Customers are considering the cost of their banking, including their mortgage, and we see that refinance will be an important part of the market over the next couple of years,” King said.
Of the other big four banks in Australia, the Commonwealth Bank launched a digital home loan in May, ANZ announced in March its aims to launch a digital product next year while NAB has adopted a new system that sees its bankers and brokers expedite loans at new speeds.
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The monthly consumer-price index indicator rose 3.4% in the 12 months to February
SYDNEY—Australia’s monthly inflation indicator came in below expectations in February, signalling that price pressures would likely continue to retreat over coming months.
The monthly consumer-price index indicator rose 3.4% in the 12 months to February, according to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Economists had expected a rise in February of 3.5% on year.
Some economists had expected the monthly CPI update to show a bigger rise, fuelled by services inflation which remains an area of concern for the Reserve Bank of Australia.
The better-than-expected inflation outcome will also help offset some of the uncertainty about the outlook for interest rates that arose in financial markets following news last week of a sharp drop in unemployment in February.
The most significant contributors to the February annual increase were housing costs, which climbed 4.6% on year, while food and nonalcoholic beverages rose 3.6% in the same period.
Alcohol and tobacco prices were up 6.1% and insurance and financial services rose 8.4%, the ABS said Wednesday.
Excluding volatile items from the data, the annual CPI rise in February was 3.9%, down from 4.1% in January.
Annual inflation excluding volatile items has continued to slow over the last 14 months from a high of 7.2% in December 2022, the ABS said.
Rents increased 7.6% for the year to February, up from 7.4% in January, reflecting a tight rental market and low vacancy rates across the country.
New dwelling prices rose 4.9% over the year with builders passing through higher costs for labor and materials. Annual new dwelling price increases have been around the 5% mark the past six months, the data showed.
The 3.6% rise in food prices in the 12 months to February was down from the 4.4% in January. It was the lowest annual growth since January 2022.
Insurance costs jumped 16.5% over the past 12 months to February, with rises in premiums across all insurance types due to higher reinsurance, natural disaster and claim costs, the ABS said.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
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