Making home loans efficient for everyone
Lendi Group, home to Lendi & Aussie Home Loans, makes choosing a home loan simple and easy for Australians. Up against a lot of big players in the industry, it wants customers to think ‘Lendi’ or ‘Aussie’ when they’re in the market for a home loan.
Technology is at the centre of Lendi Group’s mission to stand out from its competitors. With its user-friendly online platform for customers and several operations-enhancing AI initiatives in the works, the product-led sales driven organisation wants to make the business of home loans efficient for everyone.
Staying true to Lendi Group’s commitment to productivity, its Founders (David Hyman & Sebastian Watkins) tried every platform out there when growing the Lendi brand before choosing Slack. According to Shanique Busby, the General Manager of Productivity at Lendi Group, they found nothing came close to Slack’s ease of use and functionality.
“Today, Lendi Group is a fast-paced organisation and its speed of innovation is complemented by Slack,” says Busby.
So, from day one, Lendi has worked on Slack and was joined by the Aussie Home Loans corporate team, following their merger in 2021.
Lendi Group is a fast-paced organisation and its speed of innovation is complemented by Slack.
The place to get work done
In 2023, Lendi Group adopted new ways of working to support its goal of building a sustainable and scalable workforce. This included a flex-first approach and a commitment to what it calls “mindful productivity”. That means helping its employees focus on the work that really matters and do so efficiently.
“Slack is 100% at the core of our mindful approach to productivity. It allows quick, open and easy communication and collaboration and supports asynchronous work,” says Busby.
Email just couldn’t match Lendi’s fast pace, with too much waiting around for responses and not enough transparency. Slack, on the other hand, delivers on efficiency and openness.
But the reason Slack has become Lendi Group’s go-to platform isn’t just the speed of communication. It’s because Lendi employees can actually do work on it.
“Slack isn’t just a communication tool. It isn’t just a replacement for email. It’s the place where we do work,” says Busby.
Thanks to Slack’s Atlassian integrations like Jira and Confluence, employees can work directly on Slack and avoid wasting time clicking in and out of other apps. For example, everyone in the organisation, from Finance to Tech to Social Media, participates in quarterly planning via Slack using the Confluence integration. This keeps everyone aligned with Lendi Group’s strategic vision and goals; an essential foundation for a productive workforce.
Speeding up incident responses with Jira integration
Lendi Group speeds up handling incident responses with Slack’s Jira integration, which allows real-time alerts and management within the team’s flow of work on Slack.
When an incident occurs, it is automatically shared in a Slack channel, giving immediate visibility to all stakeholders and providing transparency for the CEO. There’s no need to coordinate and wait for a meeting because everyone can catch up asynchronously.
As a result, the right people can start solving an issue immediately, taking incident response times from days down to just hours. Most importantly, these faster responses create better customer experiences.
Saving hours with automated workflows
Lendi Group has automated many of its internal processes with Slack so it can redirect time to more valuable work. While getting employees to follow new processes can sometimes be hard, the adoption of these workflow automations hasn’t been a problem because the team is so used to working in Slack.
Take the example of processing a new hire. From start to finish, this is now done through a Slack workflow, meaning what used to take hours now takes just minutes.
Booking travel for employees has also gone from hours to minutes with the help of an easy-to-follow Slack workflow.
Slack is a core security tool
Security is a serious matter for a fintech like Lendi Group, but Slack’s enterprise-grade data protection and features like single sign-on give Lendi Group confidence in meeting compliance standards when it works on Slack. Busby goes so far as to say that Slack isn’t just a secure platform—it’s also a way to create new processes that increase security.
“According to our Head of Security and Cyber, Slack isn’t just compliant. It’s become a core security tool itself,” says Busby.
With security authorisation workflows for engineers, exemption workflows and incident management all done in Slack, Lendi Group’s ways of working are more secure than ever.
Scaling sustainably with AI innovations
If you talk to any manager at Lendi, they’ll tell you that finding new ways to use AI to increase efficiency is their top priority.
Shanine Serrano Pineda, Social Media Manager at Lendi Group, explains that Slack is helping Lendi realise its AI potential faster.
“One way Slack helps Lendi gain a competitive advantage is the speed that we can operate, meaning we can adopt new AI capabilities at a rapid pace,” says Serrano Pineda.
One way Slack helps Lendi Group gain a competitive advantage is the speed that we can operate, so we can adopt new AI capabilities at a rapid pace.
In 2024, Lendi is releasing two new AI innovations: an AI-powered broker assistant and a bot to answer broker queries. For Lendi Group, AI has the potential to provide better customer and broker experiences at a time when speed is key. It will create more opportunities for customers to self-serve and free up employees to spend time on higher-value tasks.
According to Busby, Slack AI innovations will work in tandem with these initiatives so that Lendi can double down on AI-powered productivity in the future.
“Slack search already makes traceability and auditing so much faster. The new AI features like channel recaps and AI-powered search will make us more efficient than ever.”
