The European mortgage market remains highly fragmented, relying on heterogeneous national legislations, paper-based workflows, and localised assessment methodologies. These inefficiencies hinder cross-border lending and complicate the creation of a truly unified mortgage market within the EU. Digitalisation has the potential to overcome these barriers, but requires rigorous methodological and technological advances.

This presentation examines the technical and regulatory challenges of mortgage digitalisation across Europe, with a focus on DigFin’s research-driven approach. We will discuss three key areas where academic collaboration is critical:

1. EU-wide creditworthiness methodology: developing robust, transparent models capable of assessing the creditworthiness of borrowers across different income types, employment structures, and tax regimes, while ensuring fairness and explainability.

2. Multilingual mortgage robo-advisory: designing AI-driven advisory systems capable of delivering accurate, compliant, and user-trusted guidance in all European languages, drawing on advances in natural language processing and human-computer interaction.

3. Automated document information extraction: applying document AI and legal informatics to parse unstructured financial and legal documents (e.g., contracts, payslips, deeds) across diverse formats and jurisdictions.

By framing these challenges as research questions, the talk highlights how collaboration between industry and academia can accelerate the development of digital mortgage solutions that are scalable, compliant, and equitable across the EU.