Bespoke broker needs demand a bespoke build, says Bridgit's head of product Amber Johnston
When Amber Johnston (pictured) first joined Bridgit, the entire bridging specialist’s team size could be counted on one hand. Today, it spans two floors of prime Sydney office space.
Back in 2021, the company was still working out what a bridging loan business even looked like; cut to 2026, and Bridgit has passed $1 billion in cumulative loans over its five-plus years of growth.
"It's been a pretty incredible journey," says head of product Johnston in an interview with MPA at Bridgit’s Sydney offices. "From day one going, 'what is a bridging loan? How do we build up our product, our business?' To now, five years later, really looking at what a multi-product ecosystem looks like for us."
Johnston explains how Bridgit went out on a limb and created its own lending platform from scratch rather than plugging into an off-the-shelf system, primarily because it felt like squaring the circle.
The gamble has played no small part in Bridgit’s rapid growth.
"Being able to determine the correct loan amounts for a bridging deal is quite complex and novel in comparison to a 30-year mortgage," Johnston explains. A standard home loan is a simple subtraction – property price minus deposit. Bridging is not. "There are multiple properties involved, you potentially are refinancing existing mortgages."
Bridgit also chose to roll stamp duty into the loan amount itself. "There weren't any systems in the market that would be able to calculate what we needed to be calculated… those mechanics were going to be very difficult to build into an existing system, and we were going to end up with a bit of a Frankenstein trying to make it fit what we needed."
The trade-off hasn't been universally popular with brokers. Some would prefer Bridgit to run through the same lodgement pathway used across the rest of the industry – a fair point, given the size of lender panels brokers are working with these days.
But Bridgit held firm. "For us, they'd be answering 20-plus extra questions that we didn't need them to be answering," Johnston says, describing the price of a standardised system built for 30-year mortgages, not bridging finance.
Successes, setbacks, and staying flexible
That's not to say Bridgit's tech stack is flawless. "If you have a finished product in an industry like this in terms of tech, I would be questioning whether or not you're thinking about what's next," Johnston says.
Regulatory shifts – like recent negative gearing and capital gains tax changes – mean the system has to keep adapting, something made easier by owning the platform outright. "We're not having to create a ticket and then add it into someone else's priority list."
That flexibility was tested when generative AI arrived. You would think that given the immense changes AI has brought to the lending process in such a short amount of time, the impulse would be to throw everything in the bin and start again.
Rather than treating it as a reason to rebuild, Bridgit treated it as a layer on top of the rules-based decisioning it already had.
"We had a really good baseline to then adopt AI," Johnston says, describing how the product team can now go from idea to a working coded prototype "in a day" – work that previously consumed a week or two of static design.
Not every experiment survives contact with the market, but AI has shrunk the cost of finding out: "Your upfront investment is so much smaller now… you can get that pass/fail kind of thing" much faster than before.
Faster workflows, smarter applications
Beyond prototyping speed, Johnston points to tangible changes in how the loan process itself works for brokers and borrowers.
"It's around surfacing information quicker and easier," she says. "Whether it's a broker or a customer, being able to present information in a way that makes sense to the user." Examples include when a serviceability issue could be solved with funds a borrower already has sitting in savings.
Read more: Bringing bridging to the masses
The speed gains have changed the way her team thinks about product design too, not just how fast it builds. "Because we can build things faster and build prototypes a lot quicker, we can go four or five steps down the pathway in thinking and designing. AI has really enabled you to think deeper and quicker, but to be able to solve problems that are more holistic than just piecemeal."
That thinking has already made its way into a live feature. Bridgit recently launched its broker scenario calculator. "Brokers are able to live workshop deals with customers if they're in their office. They get full servicing and they're able to single-click that into an application as well."
It all sounds great, but the lingering question is: has AI impacted Bridgit's hiring strategy? "Not necessarily," says Johnston, "but I think it's changed where our team grows."
She contends that Bridgit's product team has always been kept lean, and AI's biggest effect has been on hiring patterns rather than job losses.
"It probably has slowed the growth of the team if [we] didn't have AI," she concedes. "But I think as well, it's probably just shifted where we're investing – probably having more specialist roles is where I see the future of that growth, rather than generalist… you can be a jack of all trades if you've got AI in your back pocket."
For now, at least, AI doesn't appear to be shrinking Bridgit's physical footprint. The company's second floor – still something of a construction zone – is a small but telling sign that growth and AI adoption aren't mutually exclusive.
