If Banking is About Realising Dreams, Let’s Talk About Homes, Not Loans

By Rik Coeckelbergs, Founder & Managing Director at The Banking Scene

Proptech, lending and credit are not the topics that I’m most familiar with, but I am glad that FinanceX pushed me to dig deeper recently. At The Banking Scene, we have a few partners in this field, and luckily, one of them, PriceHubble, recently hosted a webinar that opened my eyes.

That session surprised me with how much has changed over the recent years. 

Sorry, let’s reframe this: I was surprised at how little has moved over the recent years, despite the art of the possible.

Real Estate Intelligence

Picture a bank that doesn’t merely show your house as collateral, a few contracts, and a repayment schedule, but offers a clear, consumer-friendly overview of your house, real-time value, renovation potential, and ESG scoring. 

Envision all this being updated in real-time for datapoints that can be fed automatically or manually by yourself, such as additional documentation, pictures, renovation invoices, and certificates.

Imagine a bank that values you as a person, and not as a client.

On the journey towards a sustainable society, some banks have been integrating tools to help their customers future-proof real estate, but have they truly integrated these tools in a comprehensive way?

Property Dashboards and Always-On Relationship Managers

“Banking is about realising dreams,” they say. And yet most banks offer mortgage dashboards. But let’s be honest: my dream was never to have a mortgage; it was to have a house. That house required renovations, and suddenly I needed a Google Drive to deal with all the extra information, with zero real-time updates on publicly available information, like new valuations of real estate, etc.

So, I hope the future of property in banking allows me to do exactly that: that it provides me an environment to manage my house end-to-end, from the mortgage to the renovation simulations and executive to the effective sale. None of that is sci-fi; it is just a matter of building it.

That way, the property dashboard will start to look much more like an investment account, rather than a mortgage liability, and it will feel like building a future, or realising a dream, instead of paying off a debt. 

Realising Dreams, and Improving Profitability

Having this overview will also enable the bank to manage savings and investments more effectively: the real-time valuation can be balanced against other investments, allowing for a much more accurate assessment in diversifying investment portfolios, improving long-term returns to future-proof your pension.

On top of that, banks can realise new cross-sell opportunities to optimise the content displayed to customers in this overarching dashboard. 

Having all the information accurately organised in one place will make it much easier to provide AI Agent assistance to the customer, helping the customer further to enhance the value of their real estate investments, while also allowing the bank to cross-sell even more. 

Managing real estate effectively is extremely complex. It demands a comprehensive understanding of financing, tax implications, construction, materials, and much more. That's why mortgage sales are often the final stage in the digitalisation process. And I understand that.

A Human-Augmented Business

The first mortgage for a consumer is a life-changing event, with an impact that can last 2-3 decades for many. It is also one of the key moments when this customer may decide to transfer all their financial services to the bank they sign with. So I understand why banks keep a human involved in the process, and why consumers expect that.

So yes, I understand the importance of keeping a human in the loop.

But once the papers are signed, customers deserve more than a digital repayment calendar. They deserve a relationship—one that evolves with their property, their family, and their financial goals.

Signing a mortgage is only the first step in a long journey filled with uncertainties and events, and banks are missing opportunities along the way. I believe that property dashboards and always-on, virtual relationship managers are a tremendous opportunity for banks to bridge some of those gaps.

PriceHubble claims 3x to 7x ROI through better engagement, more product sales and deeper wallet share, and that is not something to ignore.

Conclusion

“When you bring ethics and empathy and emotional intelligence into an organisation and into the product design and product delivery, and the user journey, we get effectiveness. That's what we should be aiming for”, said Ghela Boskovich once at The Banking Scene Art Night, and that is exactly what the above is about.

If banking is about realising dreams, they should treat the purchase of a house, which most people at the beginning of their life dream about, not as yet another sale, but as a precious realisation for the customer. 

By doing so, they allow for a more effective approach in dealing with mortgages, one that is empathetic. And because I believe this is much more than just caring for customers, I’d like to close the blog with one last quote from Ghela, to explain the business case in 5 words: “Empathetic services drive business”.

Let’s not just digitise mortgages.

Let’s humanise them.