The AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies list, published on Friday, has revealed the top innovators in 10 categories – agriculture, mining and utility; banking, superannuation and financial services; government, education and not-for-profit; health industries; manufacturing and consumer goods; media & marketing; property, construction & transport; professional services; retail, hospitality, tourism & entertainment; and technology.
Each category has a prize-winning innovator.
Apart from these 10 category winners, there are six special innovation prizes for best product; best service; best marketing; best internal innovation; best innovation program; and best CSR innovation. The overall best innovator, the top prize, this year has been won by Nano Digital Home Loans.
These are the top 10 innovations in the banking, superannuation and financial category.
Innovation: Geospatial Analytics Capability
Staff: 100-499
Visa uses an artificial intelligence model to determine a customer’s “effective area of influence”, or, essentially, the suburbs they like to shop in and what they like to spend there.
David Peacock, Visa’s head of consulting and analytics for Australia-Pacific, says data provide a broader perspective for businesses.
That information can then be harnessed by tourism providers and local councils to prioritise funding to boost local economies.
“When we look at individual retailers or service providers, they’re only seeing what’s happening within their own store. They’re not seeing what’s happening outside,” says David Peacock, Visa’s head of consulting and analytics for Australia-Pacific.
“This provides them with a much broader perspective to help them to make decisions around how they better meet the needs of those tourists.”
Innovation: Customer Experience 2.0
Staff: 20-99
Josh Funder, of Household Capital
A house is not just housing, it can also provide funding “for life”, says CEO Josh Funder. That’s the central tenet of Household Capital’s Customer Experience 2.0 technology.
The technology allows customers to access scenarios showing how much they can get from their home equity, how much they can access now and how much they could access in the future. That’s coupled with purpose-based lending, for things like renovating a home or funding aged care.
“The… ability to genuinely access and understand home equity and the opportunity has been absolutely lacking from our sector,” says Funder.
“[Customer Experience 2.0] delivers awareness, understanding, access and trust.”
Innovation: Licence to Work Program
Staff: 500+
At 12.6 per cent, South Australia’s youth unemployment rate is more than double the state average of 5 per cent.
Millie Badcock, of RAA Licence to Work program.
And that gap is even wider among Indigenous and non-Indigenous South Australians.
The Royal Automobile Association’s Licence to Work program aims to reduce this by helping students score their driver’s licence and gain a job by offering more than 1600 hours of free professional driving lessons this year.
“Having a driving licence is like having a passport to work for many young people,” says Emily Perry, RAA general manager of community and corporate affairs.
Innovation: Shaype Embedded Finance
Staff: 20-99
Shaype’s Embedded Finance platform is a one-stop-shop financial services offering, which uses modern cloud technology architecture to allow any company to offer customers financial products without needing to build those products themselves.
Embedded finance is the use of financial services or tools by a separate provider, which could be a retailer offering loans for expensive products or a supermarket or petrol station offering insurance.
Shaype’s embedded finance capability is also being used by incumbent lenders, like CommBank.
“The outcome is a more confident business in servicing customer needs now and in the future,” a Shaype spokesman says.
Innovation: WLTH Portal
Staff: 20-99
Digital lender WLTH launched its online portal to provide one consolidated dashboard offering customers a view of their entire WLTH life.
WLTH describes the innovation as “software architecture” which creates and maintains synchronised customer records across multiple repositories.
It means customers save time and face less complications when dealing with usually disconnected areas of their financial lives, such as personal accounts and loans, rewards programs, business payments and business account management.
“It was extremely important … we took a macro view of where we wanted to be within a 36-month window and ensure we built the infrastructure from day one to support the vision,” said CEO Brodie Haupt.
Innovation: The Lygon Arc platform
Staff: 20-99
Lygon staff at a Christmas party.
Lygon CEO Justin Amos and COO Rodolf Salem.
Typically, it takes 31 days to obtain a paper bank guarantee. But if any of the documents involved need to be amended at any time, the clock starts again.
Lygon, a digitised bank guarantees platform, introduced the Lygon Arc Platform to create a standardised, legally binding digital document.
Stored on a blockchain ledger, the document can’t be copied, tampered or deleted.
“We were able to roll out a platform that reduces issuance time to as little as a day, gives users the ability to amend and transfer guarantees with the click of a button, and eliminates the risk of fraud and loss,” a spokesman said.
Innovation: Generation Life LifeIncome
Staff: 20-99
No one wants to spend their retirement worried about running out of money, but it can be hard to figure out just how much to spend to avoid regret in later years.
The LifeIncome product was developed to optimise retirement income by working with other retirement products, such as an account-based pension. It offers investment-linked annuities, which guarantee a guaranteed, but variable income for life.
“The most important element in this innovation is the potential for higher overall returns and therefore higher income payments to the client during the life of the lifetime annuity,” a spokeswoman said.
“For some retirees, that additional income could be the missing link.”
Innovation: Pepper Resolve
Staff: 500+
Pepper Resolve is an automated home loan offer tool which can detect when a borrower’s application is likely to be declined, and automatically see if there’s a suitable Pepper Money product.
The product was born when the Pepper team was visiting a mortgage broker’s office when one of the broker’s customer’s home loan application was declined by a bank.
“The broker was about to call the customer and deliver the bad news, but we intervened and asked to see the loan application first. We realised we could help the customer and provide them with an indicative rate,” CEO Mario Rehayem said.
Some of the staff members of Honey Insurance.
Innovation: Smart Home Sensors
Staff: 20-99
What if an insurer helped you prevent a fire starting, or a water leak occurring? That was the question that launched Honey Insurance’s Smart Home Sensors.
Health insurers had encouraged people to stay healthier, car insurers had rewarded customers for driving less, so why not home and contents insurance?
The multi-functional sensors are purpose-built to prevent accidents and claims. For example, placing a sensor near a smoke alarm means homeowners will be alerted if a fire breaks out while they’re away.
Similarly, sensors on doors can detect motion in the event of a potential break-in, and sensors placed under washing machines can detect water leaks.
Innovation: Ozone platform
Staff: 20-99
Doc Klotz and Ben Taylor, of Oxygen Home Loans.
Mortgage broker’s Ozone technology suite allows homebuyers and agents to access all information on a prospective sale on demand.
The Open For Inspection self-serve tool lets potential buyers – once they’ve visited an inspection – access the price range, building reports, floor plans, strata fees and rates and home loan finance.
“[Previously] customers would have to ask the agent if they had a finance broker to speak to,” Oxygen managing director Ben Taylor said.
“We make it much easier and faster to manage the agent/mortgage broker relationship while also speeding up the mortgage application process for home buyers.”
It’s hard to make a decision without all of the information available to you, and for small businesses in tourism hotspots, the ability to decide quickly and confidently is critical.
That’s according to David Peacock Visa’s head of consulting & analytics for Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific.
Visa’s winning innovation, its Geospatial Analytics Capability, uses depersonalised transactions data to see how people are spending money, where they’re spending it and what they’re spending it on. For tourism centres, it’s a whole new level of customer insights.
“One of the challenges which a lot of regional centres and tourism providers have had is that the previous ways to get data and insights in the industry have been survey-based,” he said.
“Typically, that would mean there might be a few thousand tourists who would fill out a survey. That’s helpful when you look at trends at a national level … but it becomes very different if you’re a provider in Mudgee.
“[You] need to be able to understand, who are the types of people coming to Mudgee? What do they want to spend on? Where are they coming from? How long do they stay?”
He said a lack of data “inhibits” confident decision-making, and by extension, the level of investments.
The analytics capability, which is powered by artificial intelligence, allows tourism providers to analyse spending in their region but also to see what’s happening in similar hotspots.
“This provides them with a much broader perspective to help them make decisions around how they better meet the needs of those tourists, and also to … extend their service offering at the same time to potentially help their business to grow.”
Visa has already seen tourism marketers identify appropriate marketing spend to attract local, domestic and international tourists, while councils have used it to set aside tourism funding.
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