Oper, a European specialist in digital mortgage origination software, is positioning Luxembourg as a priority expansion market as it seeks to deploy its artificial intelligence-driven underwriting tools with local lenders.
In an interview with Paperjam, chief executive and co-founder Geert Van Kerckhoven set out Oper’s pitch, saying the company focuses on automating the full mortgage origination journey for banks, from lead generation through to a qualified electronic signature.
An AI agent
Van Kerckhoven described mortgage origination as an area where processes remain “very fragmented, complex and paper-based”. Even where digitalisation has started, he noted, “very few banks offer a fully digital end-to-end borrower journey”. The bottleneck is particularly acute in underwriting, where credit analysts still manually verify whether borrower data is consistent and correct across documents. In complex cases, he said, “up to 100 documents need to be validated”.
Our AI agent, Herman, supports credit teams by handling that verification and policy-checking work in a fully transparent and auditable way.
To address this, Oper has built an AI agent, branded “Herman”, to support credit teams. According to Van Kerckhoven, Herman “supports credit teams by handling that verification and policy-checking work in a fully transparent and auditable way”. Tasks that currently require hours of manual review are reduced to “under three minutes”. Across more than 20 European lenders, he said this automation has “reduced processing costs, accelerated time-to-decision and improved conversion by 27%”.
Oper is currently active in six countries. Van Kerckhoven said its platform is already compatible with Luxembourg’s regulatory, digital identity and electronic signing frameworks. The company can deploy its technology either through application programming interface integration or via a full user interface, with the pace of any rollout depending primarily on the “timelines and needs of each bank we partner with”.
Mortgage-specific, regulation-driven design
In setting out how Oper differentiates itself from other digital mortgage and automation providers, Van Kerckhoven emphasised a focus on the full funnel, regulatory compliance and mortgage specialisation.
He said the company delivers “end-to-end funnel optimisation”, covering “origination from lead to qualified signature in a single tool, allowing a true end-to-end digital mortgage origination”. Lenders can keep “a ‘human in the loop’ but it’s not needed” from a technology perspective, as the system is designed to automate the entire workflow if required.
A second point of differentiation, he argued, is “bank-grade workflow automation with auditability”. Underwriting steps, compliance logging and document rules are “configurable and transparent by design”. He stressed that “regulation and compliance is at the core of our product”, and that when building AI agents “the starting point is the EU AI Act”.
Third, Oper presents itself as “built for mortgages”. While some competitors target multiple lending verticals, Van Kerckhoven said that at Oper “we are mortgage experts and our platform is built for the lender and the highly regulated environment they are operating in”.
Finally, he described research and development as central to the firm’s positioning. He said Oper is “at the forefront of the agentic revolution, vertically integrating AI with proven data points from customers”, signalling an intention to deepen the use of agentic AI models within lending operations.
Targeting Luxembourg
Oper does not yet have a direct presence in Luxembourg, but Van Kerckhoven framed the country as an attractive next step in the company’s European expansion. “Luxembourg combines recovering mortgage activity with strong digital enablers and a concentrated lender landscape,” he said.
Any adoption of digital tools or public effort to digitalise mortgage journeys is a really strong fit for Oper’s platform
Falling interest rates have “brought demand back”, while mortgages remain “strategic for banks”. From Oper’s perspective, a “handful of large lenders” translates into “a clearer enterprise sales map, while still offering meaningful volume”. At the same time, a strong policy focus on housing and affordability adds further process complexity in mortgage lending, creating opportunities for automation. According to Van Kerckhoven, this is an area “where our automation and auditability help banks scale efficiently”.
DocuSign and LuxTrust
Luxembourg’s digital identity infrastructure is another factor in Oper’s market assessment. The country has widely adopted digital identity tools such as LuxTrust and applies European eIDAS standards for electronic identification and signatures.
Van Kerckhoven said that “any adoption of digital tools or public effort to digitalise mortgage journeys is a really strong fit for Oper’s platform”, and that this “is also the case for digital ID tools”. Oper has a partnership with DocuSign that allows the platform to support digital identity, remote know-your-customer checks and “qualified electronic signatures aligned with eIDAS”.
In Belgium, Oper integrates the itsme digital identity scheme and, according to Van Kerckhoven, “it has shown that qualified electronic signatures does increase speed and compliance in mortgage processes”. He underlined that DocuSign supports LuxTrust and that its strong adoption in Luxembourg “is a strong plus for us”, enabling the company to “achieve the same benefits as in Belgium in terms of speed and security”.
Impact for Luxembourg homebuyers
Although Oper’s commercial focus is on lenders’ cost-to-serve, conversion and speed, the firm argues that end-borrowers will also see benefits if Luxembourg institutions adopt similar tools.
“Yes, the benefits definitely show up for homebuyers too,” said Van Kerckhoven. He explained that when processes run more smoothly on the lender side, “buyers get a clearer, more predictable journey”. Borrowers can see what is needed at each step, submit documents digitally and “avoid the endless back-and-forth that usually slows things down”.
According to him, decisions are delivered more quickly, simulations and affordability estimates are “more accurate early on”, and the closing can be handled digitally, “even remotely - when needed”. For homebuyers, he argued, “all of that reduces stress at the moment when speed and certainty really matter”.
Given the widely implemented use of digital tools and public efforts to make housing more affordable, we see a lot of potential Agentic AI for lenders in Luxembourg
A volatile mortgage market
Beyond core automation, Oper sees Luxembourg’s market conditions as fertile ground for more advanced agentic AI applications in lending. Van Kerckhoven pointed to implementations in other countries where “in markets with rising volumes, automations do create higher customer satisfaction and bring people faster to homeownership”.
With mortgage volumes “currently increasing in Luxembourg”, he warned of “a strong risk to experience bottlenecks as lenders can’t adapt quickly enough in a highly volatile market”. In that context, he said, there is “a lot of potential Agentic AI for lenders in Luxembourg”.
He argued that the country, “well-known for its strong financial sector”, could use such technologies to demonstrate that banking “is not a traditional sector but embracing technology to focus on what they are best known for - excellent and highly personalised customer service”.
Strategic goals
Looking ahead over the next three to five years, Van Kerckhoven set out three main objectives for Oper. First, he said the company aims to “become the leading digital origination and operations platform for European lenders”.
Second, it intends to “scale agentic AI across underwriting workflows with full auditability and develop new agentic AI use cases to push automations in lending even further”. Third, Oper wants to “deliver step-change improvements in cost-to-serve, conversion, and time-to-decision for banks”.
Within that growth plan, Luxembourg is described as “a priority expansion market”. The country “pairs strong digital ID foundations with a concentrated set of lenders and a recovering market”, which, in his view, makes it “ideal for fast, measurable impact and referenceable transformations”.
