10th December 2024 – Written by Neil Wyatt

The Intermediary speaks with Neil Wyatt

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Published in The Intermediary November 24

The Intermediary speaks with Neil Wyatt, sales and marketing director at Mortgage Brain about tech the works now and plans for the future.

What does Mortgage Brain offer the modern broker?

 

Technology means so much to different people. When it comes to mortgage sourcing, there are three distinct pots. First, you have your back-office systems, your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Mortgage Brain has two desktop application CRM systems, which have won multiple awards over the years. They’re used by thousands of brokers to manage their client base and keep them safe and regulatory.

Second is what was historically called mortgage sourcing. That’s expanded over the last five years to be so much more than just the rate. The rate, you could argue, is the final point the broker gets to with the research – there’s affordability, policy and the property, as well.

Our mortgage sourcing solution encompasses all four of those elements. You can look at the policy and criteria of more than 100 lenders, including 37 mainstream lenders, and we’ve embedded automated valuation models (AVMs) into all our systems. The broker can see real-time data on the value of that property.  This improves broker productivity, because they can do so much more with that data.

Finally, there’s client nurturing or lead generation. We have more than 100 firms that use our web services – where we design and implement a website for them. There are also hundreds more firms that take mortgage plug-ins from us, which they can power through their own websites. We also have Google forms that they can put onto their websites, which can automatically pre-populate leads into the CRM for them.

On the back of the horrendous mini-Budget lenders were changing their products almost daily, and whatever system a broker was using, that pace of change meant they were potentially looking at products which weren’t live anymore. We made the decision to invest and reduce our turnaround time.

If we think about a broker’s day-to-day, going back five years, even 10, I hate to think how much time was spent on the telephone to BDMs or mortgage desks trying to place cases.  The emergence of policy and criteria systems that allow a broker to answer specific questions and place a case is huge.

We find ourselves in a situation where, as a provider building solutions that saves brokers time and effort, lenders are now adopting those solutions themselves.  That’s testament to what we’re developing here.

What day-to-day challenges does tech like this aims to address?

 

We’ve recently done some surveys which found that brokers believe they are going to be busier over the next 12 to 18 months, and that consumers want to act quick and make decisions quicker.

We’re also facing a world where broker revenues are slightly lower, because of the move towards product transfers (PTs). This is added to customer expectations driven by the media and what happened in the mini-Budget, which is adding to the need to move quickly.

Brokers are having to write more business, possibly for the same or slightly less revenue, but they have to do it quicker, so there’s a huge productivity piece in there.

Then, you have to factor in the Autumn Budget, and the impact on some small to medium (SME) brokerages when it comes to National Insurance Contributions (NICs)

So, how do we bridge that productivity gap? First we’ve launched the Mortgage Brain Hub, looking at some of the pain-points that brokers have around logging into multiple systems, or not having everything in one place for all the different parts of the journey. The Mortgage Brain Hub puts all of our products into one single online space. It allows brokers to manage their own licenses, their own systems, control their own panels – they can do it all themselves, with  training and support provided. Second, we know that the most time-consuming part of a broker’s job is the transfer of data from one system to another and then the matching of that data.

To that end, we’ve just launched a solution called Submissions Brain. We have our first transactions flowing through that now, for lenders such as Halifax, Nationwide and Santander, and the feedback from brokers is getting to the decision in principle (DIP), it’s saving them between 15 and 20 minutes.

The key to all of this, is actually helping brokers change their own habits and their own businesses.

Lenders potentially have to make decisions based on the size of their distribution, so those distributors that brought in a lot of mortgages possibly held the pen on integrations. That  becomes quite challenging for the lender, because if every integration is bespoke, there’s only so many they can do at a time. So, we’ve said to lenders that we’re quite happy to share the technology that runs our new submissions solution.  We are also sharing it with what some might call our competitors, our peers. We’re making that available to them, which could mean a lender that connects to Mortgage Brain can automatically connect to any other CRM in the UK, or any broker’s proprietary systems.

There are huge benefits there. One being that that means the mortgage lender gets fuller distribution. Next it means that the end consumer and the broker benefit regardless of which network they choose, or which system they choose.

We believe that is good for the industry. Otherwise, the risk you run is that the bigger people get bigger, and smaller brokers become more inefficient and potentially can’t compete.

Not every single broker will have a proprietary system in their offices, or they may choose for whatever reason to not to integrate. Therefore, in our new Mortgage Brain Hub, we’re also building that technology as a standalone solution, which means that any broker in the UK will be able to register and have access to secure authentication, the ability to create and submit DIPs or full mortgage applications to any lender on the service.

Does the market need greater connectivity and collaboration?

 

Yes – we’ve obviously got the Open Property Data Association (OPDA), which is doing a great job, and there are lenders that have invested into technology.

What we need to be mindful of is that a lot of work needs to be done by lenders, by distributors, and by other people to standardise data, as well as in Government. There is an awful lot of work to do as an industry.

The industry is working together and working to collaborate. The risk, though, is that sometimes we focus too much on tomorrow’s world, rather than today. We’re building solutions that brokers could choose this afternoon.

As an industry, we have to balance those two bits together. We have to be looking to the future, but building solutions that can change the market today. It’s a balancing act.

Covid-19 obviously brought a raft of changes into the industry, the mini-Budget brought more. What have we learned as a business is that we must be agile. The way we’re building out our technology, the way our people think, is about reacting quickly to industry changes.

The main things we’re building towards are, first, how do we ensure that lenders can actually digitise their mortgage originations. Second – and this will get a different response depending on who you ask – is the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

Do I think AI will replace mortgage advice? Absolutely not. Do I think AI has a role to play in supporting intermediaries? Absolutely.

How can technology help brokers with regulation?

 

Technology will massively help with the Consumer Duty – segmenting customers, managing customer queries, the constant scanning and reviewing to make sure that the advice and the products are still fit for purpose, customer engagement, even down to the reporting on Consumer Duty, lead generation and vulnerable customers.

That’s probably the biggest element of how technology is going to have to continually adapt to make sure that it helps brokers meet what the regulator’s asking for.

At the moment, when we talk to the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI) and the other trade bodies, it’s about the time and effort that’s going to be put onto a business if people aren’t using technology to meet the Consumer Duty.

How do you solve today’s problems while remaining flexible?

 

The biggest bit for us is data structures, and the groundwork that goes into building it all.

The reality is that everything we’re building now is about the standardisation of the documentation that’s being shared. That’s all we can really do. The intention is there as an industry, and we believe that the standards should be black and white.

As we integrate with more lenders, we challenge them on our own data standards. We should be working with people and saying ‘we are the technology experts here, we’ve got a history of a business of delivering solutions, so trust that expertise’.

Going forward, we will engage with all the relevant parties that are looking at that picture for tomorrow, understand what they are building, and wherever possible, we will try to ensure that’s all been captured in what we’re building for today.

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