Case study · HFHL · Mortgage broking · Melbourne, Australia
From a tangle of Excel files to a 20-broker loan pipeline.
HFHL was running the whole brokerage out of spreadsheets — a master pipeline, per-broker trackers, and a shared drive of PDF payslips. We shipped a single web app that holds every application end-to-end, with AI doing the heavy lifting on documents.
The problem
Excel was holding the brokerage together.
- The whole loan pipeline lived in Excel — a 'master' tracker, per-broker copies, plus a shared drive of PDF payslips and bank statements.
- Version conflicts were daily: two brokers updating the same row, applications dropping off the radar between stages, no audit trail of who touched what.
- Processors were re-keying borrower data from PDFs into the tracker. Bottlenecks (sitting in Conditional Approval for two weeks) were invisible until clients chased.
What we shipped
A single web app that runs the entire pipeline.
- 01End-to-end loan application management — one record per application, moving through a stage-gated pipeline from new lead to settled and post-settlement.
- 02AI document hub: borrowers upload payslips, bank statements and ID; OCR extracts the fields and pre-fills the file. Brokers verify rather than re-type.
- 03Live kanban + manager dashboards: every staff member sees their queue, every manager sees throughput and where deals are stuck.
- 04Stage-driven task templates: each stage spawns the right checklist (doc requests, lender submission, conditional follow-ups) so nothing gets missed.
- 05Audit log + role-based access — every state change is timestamped, every doc upload attributed, ready for compliance review.
Digital transformation benefits
Why moving off Excel changed the day-to-day.
Single source of truth
One application record. No more reconciling a broker copy against the master tracker — every keystroke lands in the same database.
AI-extracted client documents
Payslips, bank statements and IDs are OCR-parsed on upload. Borrower name, employer, income figures, account balances — auto-extracted, broker confirms.
Stage-gated pipeline with audit trail
New Lead → Pre-approval → Submitted → Conditional → Unconditional → Settlement → Post-settlement. Every transition is timestamped, attributed, and reversible.
Real-time manager visibility
Pipeline value, conversion-by-stage, age-in-stage, broker load — dashboards that read off the live database, not a Monday-morning Excel pull.
Bottleneck + SLA detection
Deals stuck in a stage past their SLA surface automatically. Managers chase the right bottleneck, not the noisiest broker.
Compliance-ready logs
Every doc upload, every state change, every note — captured against a user, a timestamp, an application. ASIC/NCCP-friendly out of the box.
Faster staff onboarding
New brokers learn the process by using the tool. The workflow is the SOP — no separate manual to keep in sync.
Reduced manual error
AI extraction + duplicate detection + required-field validation catches the data-entry mistakes that used to surface at the lender, not the desk.
The outcome
Live with 20+ staff on the platform.
- 20+ staff active on the platform — brokers, processors, settlement officers and managers.
- Excel pipeline fully retired; single source of truth for every application HFHL handles.
- AI OCR removes the bulk of manual data entry — borrower files are populated from documents in seconds, not minutes per application.
- Manager visibility moved from 'ask the broker' to a live dashboard showing pipeline value, conversion by stage, and stuck deals.
Where AI shows up
Not a sidebar — woven through the workflow.
Lead intake
Inbound referral emails / PDF lead forms parsed automatically into application fields — broker doesn't re-key the borrower's name, contact, loan amount.
Document hub
OCR + entity extraction on payslips (gross/net, frequency, employer), bank statements (BNPL, recurring obligations, end balance) and IDs. Auto-fills serviceability inputs.
Credit + serviceability
AI risk-flag pass — surfaces undeclared liabilities, irregular income patterns, and prompts the right lender shortlist with a rationale the broker can edit.
Pipeline
Next-action suggestions per card ('no movement 7 days — chase Doc X', 'lender expected to respond today').
Settlement
AI-drafted client comms — conditional-approval letter, settlement checklist, post-settlement follow-up cadence.
Stack
Hosted on Cloudflare, AI-augmented end-to-end.
Interactive walkthrough
Open the interactive prototype →
Six screens, one click-through. Each screen explains who's acting, what the AI does, and how the design reflects HFHL's workflow.
Open prototype →