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Arthr, launched by national brokerage 1st Street, allows prospective borrowers to ask mortgage-related questions and receive answers based on current lender rates and credit policies.
Users can ask questions about potential repayments, refinancing costs, or which lenders may be willing to lend to them based on their income.
Drawing on open banking data, the service refreshes lender interest rates nightly and can assess a borrower’s income and expenses against individual lenders’ serviceability calculators.
It also reviews lender credit policies against the customer’s circumstances and requirements, identifying which lenders may be willing to lend and how much.
Arthr asks users questions about their financial position, builds an assessment as they provide information and allows them to adjust their details to explore different scenarios.
However, the service does not submit an application without the customer’s confirmation, with a 1st Street broker reviewing each file before it is sent to a lender.
Brokers instead receive an AI-generated document highlighting the key points of the conversation, providing the foundations for a loan application and an ongoing client relationship.
Laying the mortgage groundwork
Co-founder Graeme Pillemer told Broker Daily that the service was designed to give borrowers access to information that had traditionally been difficult to navigate without professional assistance.
“People are put off exploring their loan options because searching online feels overwhelming,” Pillemer said.
“Some turn to ChatGPT or Claude for clarity, but without accurate rates and the tools to properly assess borrowing capacity, the answers they’re getting from these chatbots are mostly incorrect.
“There’s a lot of times when you’re going through a complex transaction like a mortgage, you may have silly questions: what does LVR mean? What do all these terms mean?
“I think many of these conversations could be handled by Arthr.”
While the platform is currently only available through 1st Street, Pillemer said he saw innovations such as Arthr as a sign of things to come.
“AI is coming, like a freight train, we all know that,” he said.
“And I do think it’s going to be incumbent on businesses to have control over their AI lifecycle.
“This is why we have developed Arthr. My co-founder Jeremy Fisher has a strong view of customer service and broker-first relationships, so we developed something that remained customer first but with the future in mind.”
He added: “We’ll test this out on our own brand and make sure it’s working how we want. Then if it’s something that we feel other brokers could benefit from, we will roll it out.”
Fellow founder Jeremy Fisher added that Arthr could remove some of the more menial aspects of a broker’s workflow.
"The AI tech is great at the questions, policy, pricing, servicing and nurturing relationships whilst providing the consumer with the tools to make an informed decision 24/7."
A sign of things to come?
The launch of Arthr comes as AI tools become an ever-greater part of the broker toolkit.
In September 2026, rival aggregator Yellow Brick Road launched its own multi-agent AI platform, designed to speed up customer settlements and improve broker productivity.
Meanwhile, Mortgage Choice has also unveiled a bolstered suite of AI tools and tech upgrades aimed at driving broker efficiency, reducing manual administration, and modernising consumer engagement platforms.
For compliance, CRM platform Salestrekker launched a new AI-powered tool last month to audit loan files in real time at the point of lodgement.
Brokers are also using AI to bring their own solutions to market as well.
For example, AI broker platform Cynario has launched Maximum Borrowing, a platform which combines AI-powered policy research with live open banking data to help brokers assess a client’s borrowing capacity across multiple lenders without repeatedly entering the same information.
Additionally, ID verification systems have also had an AI makeover, with Melbourne brokerage Finspo releasing a new tool that extracts client data from identification documents, pre-populates application fields, and checks the information against existing records
Indeed, the increasing use of AI in the broker channel has not been ignored by regulators, with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission laying down strict parameters on how brokers use automated decision engines and AI tools in its newly released report, Mortgage brokers: Review of best interests duties and complaints handling practices.
Pillemer said the launch of Arthr reflected a broader shift towards AI-led mortgage services, with the technology potentially changing how borrowers engage with brokers throughout the lending process, particularly among younger generations.
“I think younger generations will perhaps want to do AI first for everything, even if the advice is still obviously coming from a broker; they would perhaps not want to even talk to a person,” he said.
Pillemer warned brokers risked being cut out of the relationship between borrowers and lenders if they failed to develop their own AI capabilities.
“If brokers don’t create their own agents that add value on top of things like Claude and ChatGPT, then things are going to change very rapidly because you can imagine brokers getting disintermediated between the AI and the lenders,” he said.
He also noted that the growing availability of consumer financial data through open banking could accelerate that shift, particularly if regulatory settings eventually allowed AI tools to do more.
He added that brokers would increasingly need to consider how they could continue to offer value beyond the capabilities of general-purpose chatbots.
“I think the brokers should be thinking, how’s my agent going to continue to add value.”
[Related: Is AI coming for brokers? Industry weighs impact]
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