I will report on work in progress showing that the geodesic flow on any geometrically finite, rank one, locally symmetric space is exponentially mixing with respect to the Bowen-Margulis-Sullivan measure of maximal entropy. The method is coding-free and is instead based on a spectral study of transfer operators on suitably constructed anisotropic Banach spaces, ala Gouezel-Liverani, to take advantage of the smoothness of the flow. As a consequence, we obtain more precise information on the size of the essential spectral gap as well as the meromorphic continuation properties of Laplace transforms of correlation functions.