NextGen.Net sales director, Tony Carn, discusses tech service provider's recent win and plans for 2018
NextGen.Net sales director, Tony Carn, discusses tech service provider's recent win and plans for 2018
MPA: What contributed to your recent AMA win for Best Industry Service?
Tony Carn: There’s a number of things which I’d like to think were significant contributors to it. A key one of those would be recognition of what NextGen has done over a number of years in the space of innovation and the initiatives that we have taken in product development. I think a lot of the times the industry realises that we’ve got a lot of great standardised electronic lodgement services, value validations and products that we offer – but the reality is they were all initiatives of NextGen in the first place that we created and rolled out. It was very good to get recognised for that in particular I think.
From a recognition point of view, apart from the technology parts of what we do, there has been in particular an investment in training and more relationship managers - so the human element, that we can engage a lot more productively and a lot more closely with the market – and not just our direct customers but our indirect customers being the brokers as well. Also as part of that, being able to provide and ultimately be recognised for a lot of subject matter expertise support for customers as they embark on new journeys; rolling out new technologies and taking on new initiatives; and making sure they meet new compliance standards. 
MPA: How will technology continue to impact the mortgage broker’s business?
TC: As we’ve seen over the last 12 months, technology is a great enabler. We’re in a fortunate position that we’re now recognised as the standard for mortgage distribution, in the broker market predominately. And because that is so well recognised and it’s a very industrialised process, it’s a natural point for example to diversify into other products – and we’ve seen that a lot in recent times where lenders are diversifying into credit cards, transactional accounts, very recently into commercial lending, a little over 12months ago it was asset finance, insurances – so there’s a lot of products for example. Also I think particularly integrating the process closer to the consumer – so we have a very strong mortgage platform, digitally, in Australia but there’s a lot of opportunity to a) integrate the customer more closely to that process and we’ve got a lot of things in the near future which we’ll roll out there which will be quite impressive; and b) how do we make the user’s life more efficient? How can we help significantly reduce reworks and requests for more information? how can we further integrate other service providers into the application process, such as ordering the evaluation, electronically validating identity documents of people and also reducing the time to input the deal? So we’ve got a lot of UI and UX refreshers in the pipeline which users will see a significant improvement there.
MPA: Plans for 2018?
TC: We have got a significant user interface and user experience refresh … also some initiatives to integrate the applicants into the application process – the actual borrowers themselves. We're also looking at deeper integration into the application so, for example, we’ve recently become an accredited user of the document verification service which is a federal government initiative that allows us to validate identity documents for customers. I’d like to think that we’ll see that come to fruition at a user level in the market and I think ramping up other products such as commercial and driving great usage of those will also be very important.
Also with the mobile app we developed in the last 18 months, we’re seeing a really great drive of uptake. More brokers are discovering it and falling in love with it and so I think we’ll see a lot more take up of that too. Things such as the applyonline mobile app really broaden the location and the ability to receive those back channels and also a lot more functionality with the mobile app in the year ahead as well.
