Transforming the Home Buying Experience With Target Group

Target Group

Target Group is a specialist in mortgages, lending, investments and business process outsourcing. Trusted by more than 30 major financial institutions, Target provides access to regulated financial services; improving business operations and transforming customer experiences.

Putting digital at the heart of a mortgage revolution

Despite the potential of technology, and big changes in other aspects of financial services, the mortgage process hasn’t changed for decades. Target Group's vision was to lead the charge on disrupting and transforming the mortgage experience.

Customers can expect to wait weeks or even months for a mortgage to complete; adding pressure to an already stressful moving process.

Target set their sights on modernising the antiquated process, and delivering a next generation mortgage experience for lenders, brokers and their customers. The solution lay in creating a brand new, digital-by-design Mortgage Hub platform, which harnesses automation to cut the process from months to days.

Target partnered with AND Digital to bring this product to life, bolstering their digital, design and technology capabilities. Harnessing Target’s expertise and knowledge of the industry, the cross functional digital team could lay the foundations for Mortgage Hub, accelerate the development of the platform, and equip Target's team with lasting digital capabilities

The Solution

Harnessing the Combined Strengths of AND & Target

AND Digital played a key role in accelerating the design, development and delivery of the Mortgage Hub platform, along with equipping Target with the right skills to manage and grow the product over the long term.

Together AND and Target built Mortgage Hub to transform the mortgage experience for all the parties involved. Streamlined and intuitive, the hub was designed and tested with brokers and lenders, delivering an award winning SaaS platform with best in class user experience, modern technology and a deep understanding of regulatory, security and third-party integration needs.

Equipping Target for the long term

With every engagement, we leave our clients with the skills, capabilities and talent to deliver and continue delivering, long after the initial project has concluded. For Target, that involved:

Shaping a long-term operating model, team profiles, and roles and responsibilities
Embedding best practice product & agile ways of working
Embedding structures, mindsets and practices to enable work to flow end-to-end with pace and quality
Building a high performing, lasting team culture

Mortgage Hub, technically speaking

Designed and built with a deep understanding of the technology landscape, processes, regulation, security and third-party integration options. The technology approach included…

A flexible, event-driven microservices backend that creates reactive user interfaces and a seamless digital experience.
Modular by design with inwards and outwards data integration
Built using a suite of open-source tools and frameworks, and APIs to support automation across the application process.
Automations include open banking, identity verification, decisioning, property valuations and electronic loan documentation.
Platform is cloud native by design, for optimal service and security protocols.
Built with multi-tenanted capability, enabling the solution to scale as SaaS and be configurable to any lender.

Supporting the sales cycle

Supporting Target to launch Mortgage Hub to market and land their first client, providing the following:

Go to market strategy planning
Client demos and Proofs of concept
Creation of marketing assets including promotional material
Support with RFPs and technical assessments
Lender implementation planning

Designed to transform

The goal for Mortgage Hub was to transform the mortgage application process, and we knew design thinking and great product design had a key role to play.. The product design approach included:

Designing the product with an end-to-end, intuitive user experience.
Prioritising user-centricity, conducting regular user testing, prototyping, and iterating.
Focussing on simplicity to streamline the process, utilising market-leading integrations for automation, including a decision engine, AVM, open banking, and OCR technology.