Overview

This page covers the business domain Mortgages of the banking business area Loans.

Introduction

SFTI’s Open Banking common-API raises the efficiency in the real-estate financing world, specifically, mortgage financing. As an example, mortgage brokers use the API to request mortgage offers from financial institutes (FI) such as banks or insurances. Standard mortgage requests can be transmitted, checked and returned between the parties, by means of POST and GET calls, in such a standardized way, that an immediate binding offer can be issues by the financial institute, without an employee having to check the request.

The API can be used in two steps: in a first step, an indicative, non-binding offer can be requested; only after an employee has checked a request, a binding offer is sent back. Secondly, immediate binding offers for standard cases are possible, without an employee checking the request. Within any offer request, required documents are transmitted to the FI and an offer can be returned as a PDF.

The transmitted data also allows the immediate retrieval of further API calls from external third-party providers, such as property evaluators or credit scores. This standardization allows the FI to automatically calculate the offer requests without or only little manual intervention, thereby saving a lot of time and resources. The overall time to get an offer can be shortened from a few hours to roughly 15 seconds, in case of a binding offer for a standard case.

Guidelines

We offer guidelines to improve and uniform our coding and documentation style. Please read them carefully. You can find our guidelines on the project toplevel Wiki (swissfintechinnovations/.github).

Business Cases

The lists in the following sections show possible business cases related to the loan type Mortgages to be covered by the API.

Internal bank cases/No change of bank involved

Business cases from the customer's point of view:

• I want to prolong an expiring mortgage.
• I want to increase an existing mortgage while keeping the conditions.
• I want to change the conditions of an existing mortgage, e.g. fixed-interest duration.
• I want to apply for new mortgage financing (new business).
• I want to calculate the costs of early mortgage repayment.
• I want to terminate an existing mortgage.

Cross-bank cases/Change of bank involved

Business cases from the customer's point of view:

• I want to apply for new financing of an existing mortgage by another bank.
• I want to transfer my current mortgage to another provider.

Bank-spanning cases/TPPs involved

Business cases from the customer's point of view:

• I want to get a list of available mortgage products including conditions (e.g. as a link list).
• I want a TPP to generate a liquidity planning for me, based on the currently available financial information regarding any current mortgage.