The Diplomat
The digital mortgage revolution in Spain is still underway, it is a phenomenon that is increasing and is also being received “very positively” by the banking sector.
This is what Rajesh Bhat, an advisor at iAhorro Technologies, considers, who has announced that “we are already working with one of the main banks by business volume in our country, and, in addition, we are about to close collaborations with several more entities.”
“By the end of the year,” he stressed, “we would like to continue growing at a good pace and have implemented our solution in a significant part of Spanish banking. We plan to be working, at the end of 2024, with five different entities.”
Rajesh Bhat explained that there has been a shift from the customer who goes to a bank branch to request a mortgage, to the customer who accesses his bank whenever he wants, via mobile phone, to carry out his mortgage arrangements.
And what is the response of the banking sector to this growing digitalization of mortgages? According to Rajesh Bhat, “some banking entities in our country have already begun to show their interest in digitizing their mortgage processes internally. Some have even already included mortgage digitalization in their roadmaps, with different scopes and ambitions.” “However,” he clarified, “there is no bank in Spain that currently offers its clients a 100% digitalized process, so we have a long way to go.”
In this sense, Rajesh Bhat, who has digitized the mortgages of JP Morgan and HSBC, stressed that “making this change internally entails many risks and limitations, and therefore outsourcing the service to iAhorro Technologies can be a solution for these entities.”
Thus, he explained that “at iAhorro Technologies we work directly for banks, and we put at their disposal our ‘Mortgage as a Service’: a mortgage platform that covers their mortgage processes from start to finish, combined with transversal services of excellence, for the management of the entity’s own users. Therefore, those banks that contract this service will be the ones that later make the digital mortgage process available to their clients.”
100% digital financial experiences
On the other hand, the iAhorro Technologies advisor highlighted that users are already prepared for “100% digital, fast, transparent and accessible financial experiences,” and commented that “at iAhorro Technologies we have two tools (Data Score and Bank Reader) that allow the user to automatically download the documentation required for their mortgage, through an API connection with Public Administrations and banking entities.”
“The percentage of users who use these automatic download tools in the entities with which iAhorro Technologies currently works is very high, over 80%. That is, 4 out of every 5 users. Furthermore, 2 out of 3 users do so from their mobile device, which confirms that the user wants to be able to request and manage their mortgage online, with preference for this device,” he noted.
Regarding security guarantees in the provision of documentation, Rajesh Bhat explained that iAhorro Tchnolgies also has mechanisms that reinforce this protection, such as the PIN code, which is provided by the Administration.
As he said, “at iAhorro Technologies we guarantee security in document validation and verification through a set of advanced technologies and rigorous security measures. We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and machine learning technologies to perform cross-checks on documents submitted by users. We are already implementing many of these technologies in the digital process of the mortgage comparator and advisor iAhorro Tan Fácil.”
Regarding the landing of Artificial Intelligence in the mortgage market, Rajesh explained that “technological trends, such as machine learning, big data or OCR (Optical Character Recognition), are already being implemented by banks in some of their processes.” . “All these technologies make it easier for both the entity and the client to adopt a digital mortgage from start to finish, and that is why we use them in our iAhorro Technologies Mortgage as a Service,” said Bhat, who added that “we have implemented machine learning models in our OCR tool,
prevents the risk of fraud, or in our propensity model, which allows us to prevent the risk of non-payment or default, and also calculate the probability of conversion to offer and signature of each user at the beginning of the operation”.
