"Mortgages become simple when we utilise the right technology to bring brokers and our people together to get the right products for their customers."
After the challenges in every part of the property market in 2023, we could all do with a win in 2024.
Whether it is helping homeowners purchase their first or next home, Buy-to-let landlords taking the next step in their portfolio or bridging investors starting their next project; we all need to work smarter to make up for the uncertainty we’ve been dealing with for so long.
As ever, our mantra is this starts by making things simple, here’s how we can do it.
Bringing experts together
I’ll talk about technology - of course - but I don’t want that to overwhelm the importance of high-quality people at every step of the mortgage process.
Technology in mortgages is to empower people to work better and spend more time focussing on relationships and technical stuff, rather than paperwork and waiting around.
So our technology is built with this in mind: how do we empower the broker to get the most out of working with our BDMs, our case managers and our underwriters?
That’s why we’ve spent the last couple of years building out our Mortgages Portal to incorporate all of our lending products, and empower brokers to be able to take a deal from beginning to end with the right technology to speed up every stage, for them and our team.
The future of buy-to-let mortgages
This all came together at the start of this year when we launched buy-to-let in the Mortgages Portal, finally bringing all of our flexible lending products into one, simple case management platform.
The true is story for residential and bridging as well, but now buy-to-let brokers can:
- Enquire in seconds
- Get instant terms
- Apply in minutes
- Manage every deal online from start to finish
- Receive live updates and tasks from our underwriters to keep deals moving
- Have a full view on all deals past and present, and totals of amounts earned from working with us.
An end-to-end process built around the broker experience, with technology making each step simpler for them and our experts helps us get to the right decision, faster. Or, if I can talk about uncertainty again: it offers certainty when we’ve lacked it for a while.
What do we mean by ‘technology’?
With everyone else talking about AI, technology can take on any number of new meanings. So what is the mortgage technology we’re using?
First of all, we talk a lot about integrations. Using the resources already out there and pulling them into our system. So we do this with Equifax for faster credit searches, Land Registry for property checks and use Rightmove for AVMs.
Then there are tools we bring to the borrower: Open Banking for income and deposit verification and Jumio for ID confirmation.
All of these small changes save your time, and crucially our underwriters’ time, so they can focus to quickly get to the right decision.
The future
Mortgages become simple when we utilise the right technology to bring brokers and our people together to get the right products for their customers.
By investing in it smartly, in a way that adds real benefit to the broker and underwriter, we can pass that on to the borrower and we can win more in 2024 than we have done recently.
