"There was a mini shock to the system last week when both Platform and Virgin Money increased their rates to prioritise existing applications. So what do brokers and clients do - should they ‘stick or twist’?"
And so it begins…
Undoubtedly it’s hard work for brokers right now, as rates are changing rapidly and as reported recently, rate switch cancellations will undoubtedly become more and more common over the coming weeks as mortgage rate pricing continues to decline, so increasing workloads on brokers.
However, there was a mini shock to the system last week when both Platform and Virgin Money increased their rates to prioritise existing applications. So what do brokers and clients do - should they ‘stick or twist’?
The increased administrative burden for brokers to negotiate this maze is huge, whilst most of this activity will result in relatively small revenue opportunities for brokers compared to the amount of work involved.
For us, it has reinforced our decision in creating One Mortgage System (OMS) in the first place, as it was conceived as the all in one solution to this growing problem. Additionally, with a constant acceleration in changes to the regulatory and economic environment, more and more clients are requiring specialist finance – an area historically drastically underserved in terms of technology.
With this background and the current environment, it’s clear that every case is taking more work to get the same result. Therefore, we designed OMS from the ground up so that advisers can dedicate their time to what really matters, providing the best advice and maintaining close relationships with their clients.
We have sought to further address this, by ensuring that OMS covers product areas such as residential, buy-to-let, second charge, equity release, bridging, commercial plus general insurance and protection. We also recognised the need to integrate with other leading broker technology to give our users best in class across all aspects of the advice process, hence our integrations with six market-leading platforms - Iress, Twenty7Tec, iPipeline, Submissions Brain, SmartrFit and Knowledge Bank - so providing users with end-to-end product sourcing, protection sourcing and criteria searching.
In addition, we are expanding our team with new first and second line software support members to bolster our helpdesk team and deliver even stronger service standards to our growing userbase. We are also looking to add experienced developers to support future system enhancements, integrations and optimisations.
The value of advice is rapidly rising and so it’s vital that brokers utilise technology to extol this value in the right way. With rates as volatile as they are, trust plays a huge role which is why more and more borrowers will turn to a mortgage broker even after undergoing some initial research. This is why mortgage brokers need to work with trusted tech partners, like OMS, to ensure they maintain the ability to both win new business and to better service the needs of their clients from application right through to completion on a consistent basis.
