Afterburner AI does deals to cover 60% of mortgage advice industry
Financial advice AI platform Afterburner has expanded to cover about 60 percent of the mortgage advice market, through new enterprise-level partnerships with Link Financial Group, NZFSG and Loan Market.
Wednesday, December 17th 2025, 8:53AM
Afterburner automates many of the admin tasks that take up mortgage advisers’ time, including mortgage recommendations, analysing business statements, bank handover forms, compliance documentation, client notes, drafting mortgage application and communication with clients and banks.
Co-founder Geoff Christopher, who is also a financial adviser at Float Mortgages, said demand for advice would increase as the economy improved and AI tools would help the industry respond more effectively.
He said Afterburner was born out of the pain points that he could see in his own business.
“There’s so much repetitive administrative-type stuff, the same thing you’re doing over and over again.
“Float made the Deloitte Fast 50 this year and a big part of that is how much productivity gains we’ve had out of what Afterburner has created.”
He said the deals with Link, NZFSG and Loan Market meant Afterburner was available to 60 percent of the mortgage advice market. “It’s just the beginning, the processing and the future of where this is going to go – traditionally, financially advisers have been very product focused.
“A mortgage adviser will go and give mortgage advice, an insurance adviser will give insurance advice, an investment adviser will talk about investments and managed funds and a KiwiSaver adviser will talk about KiwiSaver.
“Where we see the future is there will be so much capacity created from how much efficiency and time saving is going to be created that advisers will be able to step into this new world of taking a more holistic lens to people’s financial situations and financial future.”
He said Afterburner would be available to Link and NZFSG advisers on an opt-in basis.
They would get an “all you can eat” service for a fixed monthly fee.
Others, who paid retail, would buy credits that could be used for different time-saving tools.
“Everyone that uses Afterburner to date up until the last couple of months has been organic people coming on and singing up to use it at retail level. We’ve had about 250 or 300 advisers that have gone on that level.”
He said the Float business had been a good test case. “Even my HR or my management or my individual team doing catchups with advisers and our team, we’re recording that, it’s summarising all those things… so rather than spending half-an-hour writing up a one-to-one summary, we pop it into Afterburner and it just spits it out in like 20 seconds.
“For the mortgage application process, all the documentation that we need to provide the banks to verify the disclosed statement of position, we put that into Afterburner with our recorded interview conversations, it goes and writes up the entire mortgage application in about a minute along with questions that the bank is probably going to ask about any discrepancies and those sorts of things.”
He said the plan was to take it into other parts of the financial advice industry,.
“The first two cabs off the rank is going to be personal risk and KiwiSaver because we’ve got specialists in the business that can help us build that out.”
Over the course of a couple of years, Float had grown from five advisers and three support staff to 13 advisers and two support staff.
“The third support staff member was actually the developer who came in and was interested in the financial advice indusrtry… now he’s just full time building out next-generation tools.”
Christopher said there had been a range of responses to the idea. “If you talk to people abut technology and specifically, say, artificial intelligence and AI there’s a really wide range of responses.
“Some people are completely in the dark and don’t know what it is and they’re either more risk averse, there’s a fear of the future, or some people are excited about it. Some people understand it. But we just see it as this massive opportunity to be able to lift the productivity of an industry and of countries and economies.”
Link chief executive Josh Bronkhorst said Afterburner helped advisers spend more time on helping clients reach their goals rather than filling out forms.
The tool can do things such as a financial statement analysis in 60 seconds, a maximum borrowing calculations in two seconds and a draft mortgage recommendation in five seconds.
“This partnership enables our network to spend significantly more time delivering quality financial advice and building meaningful client relationships. As we look ahead to increased demand for financial services, having the right technology infrastructure isn't optional. It's essential for delivering the service standards our clients deserve.
“This is about liberating the Link Financial Group network to do what they do best and positioning them at the forefront of AI adoption globally. We do believe, though, that the 'why' is the most important aspect of any AI development project, and we're very clear on ours: empowering financial advice professionals to deliver better outcomes for their clients."
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