A national award, three years of hard work and why we built Accurateli

On Wednesday, 22 July 2026, Accurateli was named the national winner of the Support Service Provider Award – Small Company at the MFAA National Excellence Awards.

It is difficult to explain exactly what that moment felt like.

For three years, Ben Callaghan and I have poured an enormous part of ourselves into Accurateli. There have been countless early mornings, late nights and weekends. There has been considerable stress, uncertainty and personal investment.

There have also been moments when we could clearly see what Accurateli could become – and others when the size of the task ahead of us felt overwhelming.

To stand on a national stage and have our work recognised by the mortgage and finance industry was an incredibly emotional moment.

We are unashamedly proud of it.

But to explain why this award means so much, we need to explain why we built Accurateli in the first place.

A problem we experienced every day

Most people know me as the founder and director of Peasy, a mortgage brokerage that has been helping Australians with their lending for more than a decade.

Mortgage broking can sometimes look relatively simple from the outside. A client provides their information, we compare lenders, submit an application and hopefully receive an approval.

The reality – particularly for self-employed and complex borrowers – is very different.

Behind a well-presented recommendation can be hours of work.

A broker and their team may need to review multiple years of tax returns and financial statements, understand business structures, reconcile different income figures, identify unusual expenses, apply the policies of numerous lenders and determine which institutions are most likely to understand the client’s circumstances.

At Peasy, we have always worked hard to keep that complexity away from our clients.

Our goal is to provide a simple, clear experience while our team handles the difficult work behind the scenes.

But creating that simplicity requires considerable time, expertise and attention.

Ben was one of the people doing that work.

He is extraordinarily diligent and analytical. He would pull apart financial statements, question discrepancies, identify possible risks and work through lender policies to give our clients the best possible chance of approval.

Over time, Ben and I kept coming back to the same question:

Why was so much of this work still being performed manually?

Self-employed Australians deserve to be understood

I have always been passionate about small businesses.

Business owners take risks. They employ people, support families, invest in their communities and contribute enormously to the Australian economy.

Yet when they apply for finance, their circumstances are often considerably more difficult to assess than those of a salaried employee.

Their income may be spread across companies, trusts and individual tax returns. Their financial statements may include legitimate business expenses that do not reflect their true ongoing income. Different lenders may interpret exactly the same information in very different ways.

That complexity can have real consequences.

We have spoken with business owners who waited weeks – or even months – for an answer, only to eventually learn that their chosen lender or lending representative could not assist them.

Others had been directed towards more expensive or restrictive lending products when, with a more thorough understanding of their position, a better option may have been available.

This is not necessarily because people do not care or are not trying.

The process is difficult, time-consuming and heavily dependent on specialist knowledge. Even experienced lending professionals can be limited by the time and resources available to them.

We saw an opportunity to build something better.

From an internal solution to an industry platform

Accurateli began as a way to improve our own processes at Peasy.

We wanted technology that could read and analyse complex self-employed financial documents, perform calculations consistently and help our team identify the information that mattered.

The objective was never to remove professional judgment or the personal service that clients value.

It was to remove repetitive manual work and give lending professionals better information – faster.

By streamlining the analysis occurring behind the scenes, our team could spend less time performing manual calculations and more time thinking strategically, communicating with clients and solving problems.

As development progressed, we realised that the opportunity was much larger than Peasy.

There are millions of businesses across Australia, and every one of them should have the opportunity to be properly understood when seeking finance.

But one brokerage could never help all of them.

By making Accurateli available to mortgage brokers and lenders throughout Australia, we could help lift the quality and consistency of self-employed assessment across the broader industry.

A broker using Accurateli can receive structured information and analysis from complex financial documents far more quickly, allowing them to identify possible lending options sooner and have more informed conversations with their clients.

Our ambition is simple:

Help brokers and lenders provide faster, more accurate and more consistent outcomes for self-employed Australians.

Our Peasy clients were part of the journey

Many Peasy clients did not know we were building Accurateli.

That was partly intentional.

Throughout the project, one of my greatest concerns was ensuring that our clients continued to receive the same care and service they expected from Peasy.

Although Accurateli required an enormous amount of my time, our clients could not be allowed to feel as though Peasy had become less important.

Our team stepped up in an extraordinary way to make that possible.

They continued answering questions, researching options, managing applications and supporting our clients while also adapting to new systems and contributing feedback to the development of Accurateli.

Our clients also contributed – often without realising it.

Every complex application we encountered taught us something.

Every unusual business structure, difficult lender policy and calculation that had to be checked manually helped us understand what the technology needed to do.

Many of our clients have told us that Peasy was able to help after another lender or lending professional had struggled to understand their circumstances.

Those experiences reinforced why Accurateli needed to exist.

The platform has been shaped by real people, real businesses and real lending applications – not simply by a theoretical view of how self-employed lending should work.

To every Peasy client who has trusted us with their finances: thank you.

You helped us understand the problem, and your experiences contributed to the solution.

What this national award means to us

The MFAA National Excellence Awards recognise achievement and contribution across the Australian mortgage and finance industry.

Winning the Support Service Provider Award – Small Company has given our team an enormous sense of validation.

It does not mean our work is complete. Far from it.

There is still much more we want to build, improve and achieve.

But this recognition confirms that the industry understands the problem we are addressing and sees value in the solution we have created.

For a self-funded Australian technology company that began with two colleagues trying to improve an inefficient internal process, that means more than we can properly express.

It tells us we are on the right track.

The people who made it possible

Although Ben and I co-founded Accurateli, this was never a two-person achievement.

First and foremost, we want to thank our wives, Amanda and Jessie.

Building a technology company requires far more than the time and effort of its founders. It affects families too.

Amanda and Jessie have endured the early mornings, late nights, interrupted weekends, financial investment, stress and uncertainty that accompanied this journey.

They allowed us to pursue something that we deeply believed in, even when doing so required considerable sacrifice from them.

Their belief in us – and in the mission behind Accurateli – made this possible.

We also want to acknowledge the many people who contributed their skills, time, advice and support to the project, including:

Dave Kowalski, Charles Morgan, Paul Sharratt, Markus Santos, Rafael Raiter, Arthur Christmann and Milycka Soriano.

A particularly significant thank you goes to the team at Creatio – especially Mitch Page and Nat Gordon – who helped us turn a very ambitious idea into something real.

Their contribution to building Accurateli has been immense.

And finally, we want to thank the entire Peasy team.

While Ben moved across to Accurateli full-time and I balanced the demands of both businesses, the Peasy team worked incredibly hard to ensure our clients remained supported and never felt that our standards had changed.

They gave us the space to build Accurateli while continuing to deliver the service on which Peasy’s reputation was built.

This award belongs to every person who helped us reach this point.

We are only getting started

Winning a national MFAA award is one of the proudest moments of our careers.

But the award is not the destination.

We started Accurateli because we believed self-employed Australians deserved a better lending experience – and because mortgage brokers and lenders deserved better tools with which to help them.

That mission remains unchanged.

We will continue listening to the users, learning from business owners and improving the platform. We will continue tackling the complicated, time-consuming work that occurs behind the scenes so that lending professionals can provide a simpler and better experience to their clients.

To everyone who has supported, encouraged, challenged or believed in us: thank you.

We are incredibly proud of how far Accurateli has come.

And we are even more excited about where it is going next.

Learn more about Accurateli here

Should you know a business owner who has struggled to have their income properly understood – or a mortgage broker who regularly works with self-employed clients – please share our story with them.

Joel Wyld and Ben Callaghan

Co-founders, Accurateli

Last updated: 24 July, 2026

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