Bendigo's Tiimely and Up using ML ‘extensively’ for home lending

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is increasing its use of artificial intelligence across its business, spanning compliance to home lending.

Outgoing CEO Marnie Baker told iTnews that AI is a “key pillar” for the bank especially helping it meet its "compliance and financial crime obligations”, as well as “assessing loan applications” or helping customers find “the next best product”.

Home lending platform Tiimely, which Bendigo has an investment in, and digital bank Up are now using machine learning “quite extensively” to speed up home loan applications.

Bendigo's lending platform, Up and its Agribusiness and Business unit were described as the bank's “three growth engines” during its FY24 results webcast.

Baker attributed the “ability to leverage these assets” as being made possible by the bank's “transformation program launched five years ago”.

The transformation has seen Bendigo and Adelaide Bank undergo an extensive cloud migration, which included shifting its digital banking system, app and web platform onto Google Cloud.

Speaking to iTnews, Baker attributed the cloud shift to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s “resilience” during the recent global IT outage caused by a problem within an endpoint security service made by CrowdStrike.

“We’ve converted the vast majority of our workloads to cloud technology,” she said. “Something like CrowdStrike, which occurred recently was a really good example of just showing how [cloud] actually improved the resilience of the organisation.

“Given that we had most of our workloads on the cloud at that time, we were able to actually recover very quickly.”

Baker added that the cloud shift and consolidation of the bank’s IT applications have created a “more streamlined technology stack... that helps deliver products quickly and more efficiently to customers”.

Since FY19, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has reduced the size of its application estate by almost half, from 650 to 324 as of the last financial year [pdf].

One platform

During the live webcast, Baker said the company is on track to complete the migration of Adelaide Bank and Rural Bank onto Bendigo Bank’s core banking system.

This is a proprietary platform known as the ‘Retail Financial System’, which according to Baker, was put in place roughly 35 years ago.

“It sounds like a legacy and an old system, but it was actually very ahead of its time... but what we've done is hollow [it] out that so that it really just becomes a core banking system that houses transactions and interfaces with our general ledger,” she told iTnews.

“All of the other components, our CIS or our CRM, product modules or pricing modules, are all actually done in new technology and using APIs now, which weren’t around many years ago.”

As milestones, the bank highlighted that its digital bank Up now has 920,000 customers, a rise of 29 percent year-on-year.

Meanwhile, digital mortgages make up 19.3 percent of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s settlements.

The bank closed the year with a net profit after tax of $545 million, up 9.7 percent from FY23.