What you need to know

• Home loan brand Aussie is surging post-merger. Following its 2021 merger with Lendi, Aussie has transformed from a fragmented legacy brand into a high-growth, digitally-enabled business – doubling monthly web traffic and lifting brand consideration from 19 per cent to 27 per cent in under a year.
• Consolidating under the Aussie brand eliminated internal competition and enabled marketing at scale – driving record sales in February and March 2025 and putting the business on track to onboard 1 million customers this year.
• Execution involved a state-by-state rollout of a full-funnel, synced media strategy – TV, radio, OOH, digital – delivered immediate sales and brand gains. It started in South Australia which delivered strategy proof points, and then Queensland "shot the lights out" after a single-week blitz.
• Migration of 1,000 brokers to a unified Lendi-built tech stack enabled faster, data-led decisions and cut average mortgage cycle time from nine months to as little as one.
• Now there is a creative overhaul underway. GM of Growth Emily Lonsdale is shifting Aussie from performance-only orthodoxy to high-velocity, cross-channel creative testing – building internal conviction, a high-trust data model, and a full-stack property platform.
• More to come: With creative scale-up and platform expansion in motion, Lonsdale hints there are still “three levers” left to pull – while sister brand Lendi eyes an AI-driven future.

In less than a year, Aussie lifted brand consideration by eight points, and set new sales records and doubled its monthly web traffic, all by doing what many merger-driven businesses fail to do: pick one brand, back it hard, and execute with surgical precision.

While it’s moved quickly since mid-2024, the story really began, as these things so often do, with a merger and a potential mess. In 2021, digital disruptor Lendi joined forces with legacy mortgage brand Aussie in a bold attempt to fuse the digital efficiency of the former with the household-name power of the latter. But good intentions alone don’t integrate tech stacks, consolidate brands or migrate 800,000 customers. That takes work. In Aussie’s case, it took about four years, with most of the customer facing activity in the transformation undertaken in the last year.

By 2025, Aussie had successfully navigated and root and branch transformation, avoiding a Frankenstack of clashing systems and customer confusion and instead delivering a streamlined, single-brand growth engine with the throttle wide open.

Rolling much of the Lendi operation into Aussie has provided the conditions on which the marketing team at Aussie has delivered some big business wins – starting with the reality that moving to a single brand (Aussie) eliminated internal competition, simplified the customer journey, and allowed marketing efforts to scale with focus and consistency. Meanwhile, enhanced tech stack gave teams unprecedented day-to-day visibility into lead flow, FTP (pre-lodgement) metrics, and sales performance, enabling faster, data-backed decisions while for customers using the new buyer's agent service, average mortgage cycle time dropped from nine months to as little as one to three months, helping them to get into their homes faster.

Aussie is now on track to onboard nearly one million new customers in 12 months, more than doubling year-on-year acquisition. Movement toward a rapid creative testing model signalled a shift in culture, from performance orthodoxy to cross-channel experimentation and iteration while the scaled Aussie brand is now a launchpad for new services creating new revenue streams and creating the preconditions to lift customer lifetime value.

From merger to mandate

Emily Lonsdale, General Manager of Growth at Lendi Group (which operates Aussie) is a seven year veteran of the company. She has spent the past year executing the strategic transition along with her team of 30 across Australia and the Philippines – and tells Mi3 the early challenges began once the merger was finalised. Lendi brought a sleek digital front-end and salaried broker model. Aussie had a vast network of store-based brokers and a beloved brand – but was barely digitised.

At the time, she says, Aussie looked like the rest of the industry: "Offline, fragmented, disconnected.

"It's a big, beloved brand – yes, we had a website, but very limited digital experiences. There was very little you could actually do online. Lendi, on the other hand is the number one digital online home loan provider in Australia.

"Bringing those two businesses together, the biggest opportunity for us was: how do you extend that experience and build an omnichannel journey with the original disruptor? You’ve got 60 per cent brand awareness, around 20 per cent consideration, and then you bring in a leading digital experience – that’s pretty exciting."

What followed was a complete reengineering of the customer journey, with Lendi’s tech stack – Snowflake, Salesforce, custom code – rolled out across Aussie’s national footprint. New websites, lead funnels, data migration. In July 2023, they launched the integrated customer experience, dubbed “Aussie Ready.”

“A thousand brokers migrated from sales processes they'd been using for 20 years,” Lonsdale recalls.

"After the July 2023 launch, we spent the next six to twelve months rolling out a bunch of complementary experiences to bring it all to life. Suddenly, our stores were flooded with leads, and customers were at all different points in their journey. So we rolled out our Associates function – which is like pre-qualification. We made a bunch of changes and realised we'd created maybe 20 per cent more capacity in the sales business through those efficiencies."

To fill that capacity, Aussie needed more customers at scale and that says Lonsdale is where the genesis of the primary brand thinking began.

"Back then, we were like every other financial services brand, with most of our spend skewed toward performance marketing. If I was going to scale to meet that new capacity, I realised two things: one, we needed to focus – we couldn’t fragment our efforts across two brands. And two, I couldn’t just dump it all into performance marketing."

Lonsdale faced a choice: continue to operate Lendi and Aussie in parallel, or consolidate under a single brand. It was in South Australia, where early testing of the new model suggested the right choices were made.

“We started in South Australia because those brokers had been on the full stack the longest,” she explains. Most stores there were fully signed up to Aussie's services: such as pre-qualification and offshore processing. "And we overrepresent in market share in SA as well, so we had high conviction it was a good place to start."

So in June 2024, the team tripled marketing spend in SA and closely monitored two things: cost per settlement and uplift in appointments.

“We saw immediate sales lift, but more importantly, we saw longer-term brand and organic traffic gains,” she says. “CPAs held relatively flat, and there was a three-month lag to full benefit.”

Queensland was next. Launched in spring, it “shot the lights out.”

"It completely outperformed. We started to get brand reads within a month. We had a sales lift within a month. We were hitting target within a month. I've got hypotheses as to why Queensland outperformed. It was a great time – it was spring, so a really good time to be in market for us."

By January, the signals were impossible to ignore.

After launching in New South Wales in November and going national just two months later, the early signs were already encouraging. Top-of-funnel indicators – the kind of leading metrics that reveal whether a campaign is breathing – were moving in the right direction. Just as crucially, short-term sales were beginning to respond.

But the real story was unfolding in the brand health data.

Consideration, long one of the the brand’s key challenges began to climb. Awareness was never the issue – when you're sitting at 60 per cent, shouting louder rarely shifts the needle. The real challenge was conversion at the mental level: getting consumers not just to know the brand, but to think seriously about trying it.

And in that regard, the shift was material. From a 19 to 20 per cent in July, consideration jumped to 27 per cent by the start of the year. The needle wasn’t just moving. It was beginning to spin.

Measurable momentum

Per Lonsdale, Organic traffic grew by 200,000 monthly uniques. "That’s not all from spend. We did a big SEO-led programmatic piece where we now have 11 million property views on the website. So we’ve also been growing the experience in parallel to support sustainable gains."

Performance spend increased 250 per cent, but the lid was kept on cost per acquisition which only grew 15 per cent. “And we’ve gradually bought that down since,” she adds.

Sales results speak volumes. February and March 2025 were record months. The Aussie website now attracts 750,000 monthly unique visitors – up from 300,000 a year ago. “Both February and March were record months for the business. We're on track for nearly a million new customers over the next 12 months, which is double where we were this time last year. ” Lonsdale says.

But transformation rarely comes clean. Month one of the SA pilot was “scary,” she admits. “We saw a really quick lift in leads and appointments, but we weren’t seeing the lodgements yet – and that’s a scary moment.”

Nervous energy

It wasn’t just the lag between marketing input and sales output that rattled nerves. The sequencing of media channels became a crucial variable in performance. In South Australia, the rollout began with performance and out-of-home media. Radio came shortly after. But television, often the brand-builder’s favourite lever, didn’t hit airwaves until a month later. That staggered sequencing created a more gradual uptick in momentum – effective, but suboptimal.

“In Queensland, we did it differently,” Lonsdale says. “In Queensland, we synced everything to launch in the same week – and we saw a faster lift. It moved in concert with where we expected, and we were able to replicate that in other states.”

Another insight? Creative velocity is only half the battle. Timing is the other. The lesson was: sync your media. Get your creative in-market all at once, and don't expect the funnel to work properly when awareness, engagement, and intent signals are moving in isolation.

This principle – that staggered rollouts dampen the flywheel effect – became central to subsequent state rollouts. It also helped build internal conviction. 

Go faster, harder

If there was a misstep, it was not moving fast enough on creative.

“We should be producing hundreds of creative pieces a week, not ten,” Lonsdale says. “When we find a piece of creative or a message that works, say in performance, I don’t want to just say, 'Oh, it works, let’s keep it in the evergreen roster.' What I want is: this piece of creative versus that one – which one’s outperforming?"

Lonsdale adds, "You get better in creative the more you iterate, the more you learn – within a broader brand framework, of course. It’s just taken us a long time, but I feel like we’re finally tipping over the edge."

The group has started building a creative iteration engine. Radio and out-of-home are in-house. The next TVC is being developed in lockstep with a revamped website.

“I feel like [brands like] Koala and Eucalyptus already run the system we’re trying to build – and we’re starting to run it really well. I honestly think it's a big shift in how you operate as a growth team. What I’m asking is for all the channel owners to come together. I’m asking people to let go of their own bias and their own performance. Naturally, if you think about us – we’re all performance-skewed. The performance team knows what works, and you can’t mess with it, because they’ll say, 'I’m not going to deliver the same results if we change this.'”

But, she says, "What we’re trying to do is challenge that thinking and say: yes, that works – but why? And what if something else worked better? What if we tested two variants against each other?

"So I think the first part is change management. The second is that it’s a different way of working for a growth or marketing team. You’re asking people to, to some extent, put aside their channel expertise – bring it in, but be open. And then also, measure creative – not just performance. That’s another thing in marketing: certain parts are well measured and well understood, and there’s this bias that some things can’t be measured. Honestly – they can."

The third and final she flags is recruitment.

"We've got our A Team. It’s a really amazing team. I had quite a few vacant roles, so it took time to fill them. If I had my time over, I’d go harder and faster. I’d have more conviction in creative. I knew it was important – but now I really know it, " she says.

"And I just think, if we achieved what we did with the creative output we had during that period – what could we have done with a much faster cycle time? That’s the thing I kick myself over."

Single platform push

The plan now is to compress the property-buying journey into a single platform.

“We added listing search two weeks ago (in early April),” Lonsdale says. “Half of customers start with mortgages, and right now, I send them off to my competitors. Off they go – and maybe REA converts them through Mortgage Choice. Maybe one of Domain’s sponsored ads picks them off. I’d much rather close that ecosystem as much as possible."

From a commercial perspective, that current approach makes sense but from a consumer perspective, the process is fragmented. "It takes way longer than you'd expect. It’s stressful. By bringing that experience together – creating a place you trust, where you can do it all and do it faster – it seems crazy to me that you can’t do that in Australia right now."

Aussie now supports 11 million property records and offers buyer’s agents. Cycle time is compressing from nine months to as little as one.

Lonsdale’s also building a high-trust data environment.

“Portals are for sellers... Our principle is we are here for the buyers and the owners. So I treat the data with the sanctity and love that it needs. The way we both win is by using that data to talk to people at the right time about something they care about. It's a win-win. They want to hear from me, it's relevant, and I'm making them better off. That, for me, is the ideal."

Lonsdale isn’t done yet. “There are still three levers I haven’t pulled,” she says. “But I know what good looks like now. And I look at the data every single day.”

For the Lendi brand, it's not disappearing. There are some very exciting innovations based on agentic AI, she says. But that’s a story for later.