Portfolio St.George Digital Mortgages

St.George Digital
Mortgages

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.

CommBank Travel Hub
Role Experience Designer
Company St.George Bank
Platform Mobile & Web
Approval Within 1 Day
Overview

One platform, three brands, one seamless mortgage experience

The Challenge

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.

My Approach

  • 1Discovery research with existing home loan customers across all three brands to map pain points and moments of confusion in the current application process
  • 2Designed a question-driven application flow that surfaces only the questions relevant to each customer's specific circumstances — eliminating irrelevant fields that previously confused applicants
  • 3Progress indicators and inline help text designed to reduce anxiety and give customers a clear sense of how far through the process they were at any point
  • 4Cross-functional collaboration with lenders and compliance teams to ensure the digital flow met regulatory requirements without introducing unnecessary friction
  • 5Iterated with usability testing across mobile and web to confirm conditional approval could be delivered within the same day in all scenarios

Turning a week-long process into a same-day decision

01

Research

Interviews with customers across St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA who had recently applied for a home loan. Mapped where they dropped off, what confused them, and what reassured them during the process.

02

Define

Defined the conditional logic that shaped the question flow — ensuring customers were only asked what was relevant to their circumstances. Worked with compliance to align the digital flow with legal and credit assessment requirements.

03

Design

Designed the full end-to-end application in Figma — from property search through financial detail collection, document upload, and the conditional approval screen. Consistent across St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA brand guidelines.

04

Test & Deliver

Usability testing confirmed the core flow held up under real-world conditions. Final iterations addressed edge cases in co-applicant scenarios and the property valuation step before handoff to engineering.

Key Work

A mortgage application that works for customers, not against them

Relevant questions, not every question

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

Impact & results

1 Day
Conditional Approval
Customers receive their conditional home loan approval within a single business day through the digital platform
3 Brands
One Platform
St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA customers all served by a single shared application experience
End-to-End
Digital Application
Fully digital home loan journey replacing manual, branch-dependent processes for all home loan applications
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