How Lendi Group is building an AI-native home lending experience

Challenge

Buying a home is one of life's highest-trust decisions, yet the biggest friction often happens between steps, when customer context is lost across systems, teams, and channels. Lendi Group set out to create a communications foundation that preserves context across every interaction.

Solution

Lendi Group uses Twilio as its programmable communications layer, connecting SMS, email, WhatsApp, voice, and AI into one continuous customer conversation. With every interaction connected, brokers have the context they need to deliver timely, personalised support throughout the home lending journey.

Buying a home is one of life's biggest financial decisions. But it isn't the individual steps that create the most friction; it's what happens between them. As customers move between brokers, lenders, insurers, and conveyancers, context can easily be lost, creating uncertainty at the moments where trust matters most.

Lendi Group knows a thing or two about building trust. The technology-led group behind the Lendi and Aussie brands helps thousands of Australians navigate the home lending process with ease. 

“In many industries, customer experience is about convenience,” says Devesh Maheshwari, Chief Technology Officer at Lendi Group. “In lending, confidence matters more. The customer needs to feel they are making the right decision, that the process is moving, and that someone understands their situation.” 

As Lendi Group accelerated its AI journey, it discovered that delivering both convenience and confidence required more than adding AI to existing workflows. "AI-native is a journey, not a destination," says Maheshwari. “A traditional organization uses software to record activity after it happens. An AI-native organization uses data, signals and agents to understand what is happening now and what should happen next.”

Rather than automating isolated tasks, Lendi Group set out to redesign its operating model so that people and AI agents could work together from the same shared understanding of every customer.

To create that confidence at scale, Lendi needed a communications foundation that could preserve customer context throughout the lending journey, turning every interaction into a customer signal rather than another fragment lost between disconnected systems.

Lendi Group partnered with Twilio to orchestrate interactions across voice, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and AI and build one continuous customer conversation that preserves context as customers move through their home lending journey.

The traditional home lending journey moved in a rigid, procedural sequence. A customer filled out a form, then waited for someone to call, waited again for an appointment, and waited even longer for the right broker to be free at the right time. Every handoff introduced a pause, and every pause was a moment when a motivated buyer could lose momentum.

Customer conversations were just as fragmented. A buyer might receive an automated message from their lender that their interest rate had changed, then pick up the phone to act on it, only to discover the broker doesn't have visibility into that earlier interaction. The customer has to re-explain their situation while the broker pieces together the context from multiple systems, making the experience feel disjointed when trust matters most.

Another part of the problem was structural. Legal, risk, lending, and product teams each built workflows around their own boundaries. Customers were burdened with repeating the same details to different people at each stage, re-uploading documents they had already provided, or receiving updates from one part of the business that the next part knew nothing about. “The customer does not experience your org chart or your systems architecture,” Maheshwari says. “They experience the gaps between them.” Removing those frictions meant giving every interaction a shared thread of context. 

That search for one connected conversation across SMS, voice, email, chat, and AI is what led Lendi Group to build on Twilio.

Instead of asking which channel to use, the team began to focus on what the customer was actually signaling through their clicks, replies, and questions. “It’s no longer a conversation about the channel,” says Maheshwari. “It’s about how we capture the signal.” By decoupling customer intent from the communication channel, the system can interpret context and determine the next best action, allowing the conversation to stay fluid without losing continuity.

Twilio gave Lendi Group the communications layer to bring that philosophy to life. Rather than treating messaging, email, and voice as separate products, Lendi Group uses Twilio as a programmable engagement layer that plugs into its own orchestration framework. 

“The biggest benefit of having Twilio as a partner is it gives us a programmable engagement layer across different customer touchpoints,” Maheshwari says. “The integration into any channel is at our fingertips.” 

Today, that spans SMS and one-time passcodes (OTPs), email, WhatsApp, push notifications, and voice. Every channel becomes part of a single, continuous thread, enabling customers to switch channels without ever having to repeat their story.

Lendi Group created an AI agent called Linda that plans and curates outreach, choosing the moment, the channel, and the message. It honors each customer’s stated preferences, so someone who asks not to be called between nine and five never is. Linda is already helping re-engage approximately 12–16% of high-intent customers who had previously disengaged from the conversation.

“It gets very personalized to you without being intrusive,” Maheshwari says. And crucially, the human broker is never displaced. “AI is supporting that human relationship, not replacing it.”

When someone enters a Lendi Group funnel today, they are met by Guardian, the lead AI agent that orchestrates the intake from start to finish. Guardian captures the customer’s intent, collects relevant context, coordinates a set of specialist sub-agents beneath it, and assembles everything the broker will need before the two ever speak.

Every customer interaction—a click, a reply, a returning visit—is treated as a signal and added to a shared view of who that customer is and what they need next. Each interaction makes the next one smarter and nothing resets along the way. "AI-native does not mean every interaction is automated," Maheshwari says. "It means humans and AI agents working together safely, intelligently and at scale."

The approach is already delivering strong engagement. Around 95% of customers who engage with Guardian actively continue the conversation, while roughly 20% complete fact finding and receive product options compared with less than 1% through Lendi's previous non-agentic, human-led funnel.

Guardian is where Lendi Group's AI-native operating model comes to life. Where earlier AI capabilities focused on specific tasks such as sales, support and appointment booking, Guardian orchestrates the entire customer journey. It reflects how Lendi's strategy has evolved from deploying individual AI assistants to an AI-native ecosystem, where specialised agents work together to support both customers and brokers.

The impact is already measurable. Like-for-like testing has shown a 2.5x increase in customers progressing from fact-find to loan lodgement, when compared with Lendi Group's previous app-based journey.

“What used to take weeks of effort can now be done in an hour,” Maheshwari says. A customer can start a conversation on the train, connect their banking, then upload documents from home, completing much of the application in a single sitting.

Because the information Guardian gathers is consistent and complete, brokers no longer have to reconstruct the story from scattered case notes or spend valuable time chasing missing information. Instead, relevant insights are surfaced before the conversation begins, giving brokers richer context at the point of decision. “The delta becomes quite small,” Maheshwari says of the gap between what a customer needs and what the broker recommends. By reducing follow-ups and rework, brokers can focus on what only humans can do: reassuring customers, providing advice, and making the judgement calls that a regulated, life-defining decision demands.

Historically, every new interaction—an outbound call that went unanswered, or a customer who came back days later through a different channel—would often reset the conversation at zero. Lendi Group is now building its outbound engagement around Conversation Relay so this no longer happens. A conversation can pause on a voice call and resume over messaging without losing the thread, allowing brokers to pick up where the customer left off rather than starting from scratch. 

“Conversation Relay is interesting because it helps us think beyond one-way communication. It creates an opportunity for more interactive engagement, where the customer can respond, the system can capture intent, and the broker can receive better context,” Maheshwari explains.

This is one of the clearest expressions of Lendi Group’s philosophy of designing around customer signals rather than channels. Because outreach begins already informed by a customer’s intent and history, it doesn’t feel intrusive. It feels personal. 

For Maheshwari, the surprise has been how naturally the company’s teams embraced the change once it made their work better. “We are not trying to build AI personalities for the sake of it. We are building capabilities that make the lending journey more responsive and easier to manage,” he says. “Very quickly, the conversation shifts from curiosity to ownership. Once a team has seen AI remove real friction from their day, they are naturally more engaged.”

In a regulated industry like property lending, speed only counts when it is matched by trust, and Lendi Group built guardrails in from the start. “We don’t let the model define the rules,” Maheshwari says. “We define the rules, then let the model help us operate.”

The result is an organization being redesigned around the customer rather than the channel, where AI handles coordination and preparation so that brokers can spend their time on advice, empathy, and trust. “The goal is not fewer brokers. The goal is more broker leverage,” Maheshwari says. The technology fades into the background, and the relationship moves to the front. Twilio provides the connective layer that makes it possible.

Lendi Group and Twilio are making home lenders feel more confident during one of the biggest financial decisions in their lives. Australians have a phrase for that kind of experience: fair dinkum. It means “honest,” or “the real thing.” That, in the end, is what all this technology is for: making one of life’s biggest financial decisions feel more personal, more human, and more genuinely reassuring.