Westpac Mortgage Calculator

Banking calculators are typically the same; stand-alone experiences, driving high volumes of traffic with low user engagement and conversion rates. Providing complex, rigid, and overwhelming experiences with intangible outcomes, they are built to align with internal systems. With these obstacles to overcome, we needed a dynamic design with best-in-class experiences, that explained simply, loan scenarios and serviceability. Then we needed to shift our messaging to focus to affordability and education, rather than on borrowing capacity. And finally, we needed to uplift our existing technical framework, from static code to a more flexible model that could be updated or scaled.

The redesign showed improved results instantly. Simpler, faster, and providing deeper insights, the highly interactive experience allowed users to see in real-time the impact of changing a variable on their loan scenario. This resulted in more than 80% of visitors engaging with the tool, equating to an 85% drop in bounce rate. Users of the new tool were also 1.5 times more likely to complete a home loan application. In tandem, a new enterprise-wide framework was delivered increasing speed to market of new experiences, reducing development time by a third, with deeper systems integration, allowing more accurate and personalised insights.

Our new calculator model is customer focused to its core. The social impact has been significant. Borrowing calculators tend to provide borrowing capacity amounts, that when broken down into monthly or weekly repayments are not affordable. Flipping the borrowing model from capacity to affordability, meant control now lay with the customer, with loan scenarios tailored to how they wanted to see information, all crucial to the decision-making process. With the overwhelmingly positive response and commercial impacts, which have resulted in increased home loan applications, the new framework is being rolled out across all Westpac calculators.

With affordability being the new focus for the Westpac borrowing calculator, our breakthrough design is ticking all the boxes. Not only does the model align with our position as a responsible lender, but it also has our end users needs clearly in sight. The dynamic fields mean users can approach their borrowing capacity from multiple angles - starting with whichever lending scenario best suits their needs. Whether they want to focus on what repayments they can afford or how much of a deposit they need, over different loan periods and with different available interest rates, meaningful figures are instantly revealed. Users can also simply dial-up or down repayment amounts with a dynamic moveable scale to instantly see how that affects their borrowing power. Simple, fast and effective, the Westpac borrowing calculator is helping Australians fulfil their homeownership dreams, with realistic and affordable outcomes.