Valocity Chief Technology Officer Nathan Scott says his team has been focused on improving internal technology and providing new digital solutions for clients to deal with new expectations around environment and climate.

“Property is a key pillar of New Zealand’s economy and most people’s key asset. There has never been a time when security, transparency and effective management of these assets has been more important. We launched multiple solutions this year to help New Zealand and its lenders deal with the complexities of the environment.”

These include new valuation and climate models for lenders, the Nexus platform for the real estate industry, and a full migration to cloud platforms. 

Valuation models that allow banks to understand their portfolio and risk were significantly inaccurate due to impacts on the property market such as the pandemic, says Scott. The team at Valocity applied new machine learning technologies and cloud technology to calculate property value, absorbing data and trends more quickly to provide the most accurate predictive property valuation model in New Zealand. 

“This resulted in lenders being able to have confidence and continue residential lending on new properties and importantly refinancing existing loans where people needed support due to change in circumstances,” says Scott. 

Climate impacts have become a critical consideration. Lenders with a 30+ year lending view on properties can guide the market with effective lending and are keen to play a major part in ensuring lending promotes environment and climate improvements. Valocity partnered with New Zealand and global partners such as Niwa in New Zealand to provide exclusive models around climate, risks to properties and the impact on both value and sustainability. 

To simplify the complex and stressful journey of buying a property, Valocity is launching Nexus, a platform supporting the real estate industry. This brings the benefits of the company’s digital, cloud and data driven environments closer to the consumer so they can purchase properties with more information and fewer steps, according to Scott.

“Our Nexus platform is launching in partnership with the real estate sector in both New Zealand and Australia. In Australia in a joint venture with Real Estate Industry partners, REIP, representing over 60% of all real estate agencies in Australia. To achieve this my team has built new cloud first technologies.”

Speed to innovate and managing costs are a key driver and internally, Valocity has created improved options and lower risk and cost by completing a full migration to cloud platforms. 

“Most recently our NZ offering has moved from traditional hosted environments to the Azure Cloud. To achieve this outcome not only did we need to undertake the technical migration but we also had to have all NZ lenders align and approve this migration of a key part of their lending platform. As the platform that enables most home loans in NZ we had to ensure this was a smooth and rapid change. We migrated all NZ banks in a space of two hours, after much interaction and testing and in partnership with our technical partners Parallo and Microsoft who both provide excellent support. This change resulted in a 50% decrease in platform costs as well as enabling greater flexibility and new services for our NZ customers,” says Scott.

“Doing more faster, reducing cost and enabling new and better outcomes has driven our innovation in the last two years. As much as all the technical improvements and change there has never been a greater need for partnership and connection with clients, partners and sector groups. My team has focused on the effective use of technology as part of creating improvements for our clients and for our markets,” adds Scott.