"Visible Loans uses the basic principles that made the Web a success - it's scalable, adaptable and low cost. This makes Visible Loans attractive across the board - from large lenders, through to aggregators and to sole-trading brokers," he said.
Since 2002, not-for-profit group LIXI has worked to develop e-commerce standards for electronically processing and administrating home loan information using a Credit Application Language (CAL).
LIXI's technical focus is to describe the loan process in terms of the data created and manipulated. Its collaboration with NICTA is about improving interoperability through e-commerce standards for business processes by incorporating CAL and Web service technologies.
The collaboration, called the Business Process Working Group, includes representatives of NICTA and LIXI, which incorporates all the major participants in the Australian lending industry.
According to Mackie, with so many participants in the industry, having just a standard vocabulary is not enough to guarantee e-business interoperability..
"The goal is for all parties to be able to communicate easily with each other, and have the means to evolve without re-engineering interfaces for each new participant with whom they do business," he said.
"To get to that point, the industry needs reference architectures, implementations, and standard guidelines on how to deploy the technology."
According to Solution 4, Australia is actually ahead of the United Kingdom in terms of the development of standards for electronically exchanging loan data.
In the UK, loan information is manually keyed at each point of the loan process. Australia is further ahead to reach the goal of straight through processing.
LIXI has more than 100 members, including banks, non-bank lenders, broker groups, mortgage aggregators, mortgage insurers, valuers, solicitors and settlement agents.