The Digital Mortgage Platform is an end to end solution for home loan applications. Customers can review all relevant questions based on their specific circumstances and submit their application in less time — receiving conditional approval within a day.
Applying for a home loan has traditionally been a slow, paper-heavy process with little transparency for the customer. St.George Bank — along with its sister brands Bank of Melbourne and BankSA — needed a single digital mortgage platform that could serve all three banks' customers while delivering the speed and clarity that modern applicants expect.
The challenge was designing an end-to-end application experience that felt straightforward regardless of which brand the customer came from, while handling the full complexity of home loan eligibility, property assessment, and approval under the hood.
Spoke with recent home loan applicants across all three brands — St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA. The pattern was consistent: people didn't drop off because of anxiety about the loan itself, they dropped off because the form asked questions they didn't understand or didn't think applied to them.
Working with lenders and the compliance team, I mapped which questions were legally required for each loan scenario versus which had historically been included out of habit. The result was a conditional question tree that cut the perceived form length significantly while meeting every regulatory requirement.
Designed the full application end-to-end in Figma — from intent selection through property details, financial summary, document upload, and the conditional approval screen. A single component set with brand-level theming allowed one design to deploy as three distinct brand experiences.
Usability testing focused on the scenarios most likely to fail: co-applicant flows, investment property applications, and customers who had previously started an application elsewhere. Iterated on the property valuation step and co-applicant consent flow before final handoff.
The biggest shift in the experience was moving away from a generic, exhaustive form and towards a conditional question flow. Before answering anything about their finances, customers answer a few simple questions about what they're trying to do — buy, refinance, or invest. The platform then surfaces only the questions relevant to their situation. A first-home buyer never sees fields about investment properties. A refinancer isn't asked about their deposit.
This reduced the perceived length of the application significantly — while actually capturing everything lenders needed to make a same-day conditional decision.
The experience was designed and deployed across all three brands in the Westpac group — St.George Bank, Bank of Melbourne, and BankSA — using a shared component system with brand-level visual theming. This meant a single design system supported three distinct brand experiences without duplicating effort.
"The whole experience made getting a home loan so much more seamless and our customers find the process so much easier now."
St.George Bank — lender feedback