Shruti Kamble joined the Target team at the end of last year. She brings with her a wealth of industry knowledge, and technical expertise of mortgage originations platforms. Here she shares more about what drives her and why she's proud to be part of our originations team.

"Our team is all new – we have the very talented Rob Hanks as Product Manager,  Alastair MacDonald as Product Owner and Alastair Knowles as Principal Engineer. For me, as a subject matter expert in mortgage originations, it’s great to be working with them.

The mortgage process is still painfully slow, and many products out there are using old tech. I recently went through a buy-to-let application for my own property. During the process, I interviewed the broker on her user experience of the system and form filling capabilities. I asked her what was making her life difficult or easy and what she liked and disliked about the system. The broker pointed out what could be done better. It made the difference between spending 45 minutes doing an end-to-end application as opposed to two hours. A cleverly designed system could cut broker application time by half and significantly improve correctness of the data.  The broker’s system was poor and did not consider the end-user. What I learnt from this was that a good system can improve the life of the user. I always keep this in the back of my mind.

I have always been fascinated by innovation. My degree major was in InfoTech – special subject AI. Following graduation, I worked in India for a muti national tech company on lending products for the US market. I then moved to the UK and did Masters in Business Administration, focussing on innovation.

Post MBA, I have worked exclusively for mortgage origination tech providers such as Finova and Capita Mortgage Software Solutions.

I love developing truly innovative products and have worked on some very exciting projects during my decade long career in lending. This has included delivering a white label Software as a Service (SaaS) product for banks and building societies.

I have also worked on a mortgage origination platform where I introduced open banking journey on direct customer portal and end-to-end limited company buy-to-let functionality on an existing product. This was a perfect fit for when I moved to Target where we are building limited company buy-to-let functionality into Mortgage Hub.

Our clients are lenders, and we are working closely with them to develop a great system.  Lenders want to serve their customers better and make  daily tasks easy for their own employees by giving them a system that is flexible, easy to use and efficient.

We are creating end-to-end solutions to cut the processing time to offer. Long-term, we are aiming for the eligible applications to go straight to offer. To do this, we will use integrations like AVM and open banking to achieve automatic offers. Before we get to that point, though, we want to ensure the product works in the best possible way. The look and feel of the product – should be super sleek, fast and beautiful. We want Mortgage Hub to be intuitive a bit like Apple – no user manual needed.

The way we build  Mortgage Hub affects day-to-day life of the end user.  If they have access to a system which is cleverly built, intuitive, and helps them to do their job better, easily and faster, they will enjoy the system.”