Afterburner is a spinoff from Deloitte Fast Top 50 awardee Float Mortgages, who originally build the AI generated service to help improve its own service.
What started as an in-house productivity tool evolved into a quickly-scaling business. The team realised that this could help many more advisers and businesses across the country, so they created Afterburner as standalone business — it’s been growing quickly since its inauguration.
The company says that the partnership with Link comes at a pivotal time for the New Zealand financial services sector, which faces ongoing pressure to improve compliance standards while dealing with adviser capacity constraints in an innovative manner.
 Afterburner’s approach focuses on augmenting advisers’ capabilities rather than replacing human expertise, with new features being developed in response to client and adviser needs.
Josh Bronkhorst, CEO of Link Financial Group, agrees. “Our advisers are professionals who joined this industry to help Kiwis achieve their financial goals, not spend their days filling out forms.
 “This partnership enables our network to spend significantly more time delivering quality financial advice and building meaningful client relationships.Â
“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.”
Afterburner co-founder Geoff Christopher says 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.Â
Advisers using Afterburner will be positioned to handle increased client loads while maintaining or improving advice quality
“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.”
“The platform also enables smaller practices to compete with larger firms on service delivery and compliance standards,“ says Christopher.
Demand for mortgage and business lending, insurance, KiwiSaver and holistic wealth financial advice will increase, he says.Â
Afterburner already serves hundreds of financial professionals across New Zealand and Australia and is growing rapidly.Â
Afterburner Phase 1Â
Live and proven time savings for mortgage advisers:
- Â Afterburner tools have been used by financial service professionals more than 500,000 times
- Â Features have been tested more than 15,000 times
- Bank handover forms automated: ~1,500
- Client credit applications generated: 2,500+
- Bank handover and supplementary form-fill automation was 15 minutes, now 40 seconds
- Financial statement analysis: was 60 minutes, now 60 seconds
- Max-borrow calculator (all banks): was eight separate Excel files and models, now two seconds
- Draft mortgage recommendation: was 30 minutes, now five seconds
- AI-powered bank policy Q&A: was a 10-minute document-scan, now a few seconds
Afterburner Generation 2.0Â
The company is about to expand beyond mortgage broking into life insurance, investments, and comprehensive wealth advice:
- Exponential productivity gains and seamless CRM-agnostic
- iOS call-recording integration, voice recorded memos, video meeting recordings/transcripts:Â
- Native, zero-app extra; recorded calls flow straight into Afterburner
- Unified data lake: Audio, video, voice memos, mortgage application supporting documentation
- AI Automated communications outputs
- Drafted bank mortgage application credit memorandums
- Call summaries and assessor email replies
- Compliance-ready statement-of-advice
