The New Broker Portal for CommBank

Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s (CommBank) residential loan book services 1.2 million customers and contributes AUD638 billion in annual revenue. In 2023, broker funded loans account for 71% of home lending, however, historical market conditions meant the digital broker platform has seen low investment, leading to a deterioration of user experience and performance. With increasing interest rates and a high-volume of expiring fixed-term loans in 2023, CommBank faces AUD82 billion in maturing loans – presenting a high-risk of customer churn. CommBank’s digital product team sought to mitigate this risk and create the country's #1 digital broker proposition.

The broker portal provides digital access to what were previously person-to-person tasks, saving up to 20-hours per week for brokerages in operations effort and reducing processing time by weeks. To achieve this, the team leveraged data and analytics, conducted mixed-methods research, designed, prototyped, and tested an updated version of the broker platform, enabling validation of key assumptions. The insights gleaned informed the roadmap and product goals for the first release; 1. Add self-serve functionality for key tasks. 2. Improve discoverability of key-features and findability of content. 3. Design more intuitive interactions and reduce the time to complete tasks.

Engagement sky-rocketed post-launch with a 50% increase in monthly active users. The re-designed broker portal achieved a top rating in user satisfaction from 90% of users surveyed, call centre volumes reduced by 350 calls per day (resulting in AUD 1.5 million in annual savings), and time to access critical loan information reduced from 15-minutes down to mere seconds. Overall, brokers have attained efficiency gains of up to 20 hours of time saved per week. Importantly, brokers have communicated that the new platform has reduced stress for their customers – as of May 2023 (release 1), >90% of balances have been retained.

We structured our design process to answer three framing questions; where are we today? Where do we want to go tomorrow? How will we get there? The approach was data-led and user-informed. Mixed-methods research guided decision making, this entailed qualitative activities like 1:1 broker interviews, heuristic evaluations and landscape reviews, card sorting, prototyping, and moderated user testing. Quantitative activities included analysis of data & analytics and call centre logs, top task analysis, tree testing and UEQ (User Experience Questionnaire) benchmarking. Some key features of the new platform include: -Responsive design catering to mobile, tablet and desktop. -A search led experience powered by autofill, enabling brokers to search via keywords and quickly find relevant applications and information. -Loan details section, including contract loan amount, method of operation, product, rate, discount applied, balance and available redraw. -Loan maturity feature, displaying pending roll-off products for fixed term and interest only loans moving to standard variable rates. -Integrated quote section, with accepted application rates, details, and effective date. -Notifications component alerting brokers of actions required or key offer information. -Admin users able to see multiple Brokers and their loan book performance.