Great Southern Bank together with Sandstone Technology re-imagine the home lending experience to deliver a robust out-of-the-box digital lending origination platform.

The Challenge

Knowing the importance in providing an exceptional customer experience, in 2018 Great Southern Bank re-evaluated their home loan processes in response to a highly competitive environment. The bank identified the need to find a better platform that would enable them to achieve scale in a relevant, responsive and consistent manner. There was also the desire for the bank to find a way to reduce highly manual processes that in turn could increase service levels, improve business efficiency and enhance the customer experience.

Re-imagining the home lending experience

An important factor for Great Southern Bank was selecting and implementing a solution that could truly reduce operational, compliance, credit risk, and automate manual tasks to allow the bank to focus on other important things such as the customer experience. This meant looking at ways to utilise automation and data through various systems and leveraging AI technology to improve the experiences their team members and brokers have with the bank. This included an investment in real-time communication which has helped to provide customers with a new level of transparency regarding the status of their loan application.

The bank has reached flexibility with pricing while adhering to risk and regulatory compliance within the home loan processing workflow. This has been achieved through Sandstone’s end-to-end loan processing platform, LendFast which provides the capability to support specific pricing per application to meet different application scenarios.

The foundations of a trusted partnership 

Great Southern Bank’s Head of Retail Banking Product, Barbara O’Connor Nash, said that by looking through the lens of the broker, customer and team member, and incorporating their feedback early in the project helped create the foundation to make the necessary changes to transform their home lending operations.

“The early and strong engagement between Great Southern Bank and Sandstone Technology was crucial to the successful partnership. The strength of the partnership can be attributed to setting the scope and clear delivery principles from the outset. LendFast has been critical to our success in offering a simplified home loan application process and reducing the average time to yes. Furthermore, as the implementation was delivered over the course of three phases, it was vital that quality was maintained throughout with the completion of each phase. And the trust in Sandstone Technology’s ability to maintain their high level of cadence, principles and quality standard was something we really valued.”