Santander The mortgage originations App enables customers to quickly and effortlessly gain a decision in principle when looking to purchase a property. By creating a streamlined journey and automating processes the headache of endless form filling and then waiting for a decision is a thing of the past. What The app is designed to replace the slow face to face process of applying for a mortgage. With traditional methods taking banks and individuals a long time to run through the application process in branch and over the phone, the idea was for the app to be able to offer decisions in principle to users which could then be verified by banks when customers wished to proceed. Native QR Security By transforming the way document procedure works and being able to digitally validate these documents securely and quickly, we could enable users to get decisions in principle quickly and easily. They could also see what types of mortgages are being offered on various properties before applying. This allows users to do their own market research and be able to work quickly with the banks, rather than forcing them to attend lengthy meetings, sending of documents and taking phone conversations, as is normally the case. The app also needed to be able to find properties that users wanted to apply for mortgages. To cover this, the app was able to read QR codes within Rightmove, Zoopla, or printed brochures. Scanning these codes would allow the app to immediately access the desired property and all of the relevant information. The user could also search for properties manually, and once they had identified the property they were looking at, they were able to immediately discover their eligibility for mortgages on the property. Why Swift was chosen as a code base as with the app being consumer facing we wanted to present an extremely polished user experience to match the high standards of customer service that Santander present. Consumer UX Intergration Another excellent advantage of using swift was the added data security offered by swift. With the app handling lots of personal data to allow for evaluations on eligibility for mortgage types we need a secure system to handle this and swift has inbuilt security features for encryption of this kind of data making a great choice when developing for a consumer facing banking app. With Swift being a native language for developing iOS applications we already had a suite of tools that gave us the ability to access directly the apple plugins and systems for using things like QR codes and location services. This meant that even though native development is more costly we were able to reduce some of the development costs by using these tools. We gave them a lot of free reign about how to develop the app — just some functional requirements. We trusted them to develop the app and give us traditional agile weekly feedback. Mark Chamberlain - CTO & COO Santander The App Consultation We were brought in to offer our advice for the Santander application. Once we had identified the stated problem we set about finding solutions for the complex and thorough systems used in mortgage applications. The main issue we solved were related to security concerns with user’s identity checks . By having the app provide enough information for the bank to verify the user, they were happy to proceed with a customer in their mortgage application. Design & UX Having agreed the required feature set we set about designing how the process could knit together, trying to provide a useful user experience by provisioning the applicant with insights into potential mortgages early in the user journey. This would allow users to vet realistic properties before moving through some more of the rigorous documentation procedures the app required. This phase also carefully considered the integration of the Santander branding, tone and phraseology. Development Using our in house native specialists we built the fully working prototype in 160 hours of development. This allowed the team to bring the working prototype into future Santander workshops to be further developed as a concept. Going forwards, new features can be added as required to support further requirements from the bank. What we do Learn more
