I think it should be the New Year’s resolution of every mortgage adviser to take criteria search seriously.
Nicola Firth (pictured), chief executive of Knowledge Bank
Looking at the average number of mortgage transactions recorded by the Bank of England up to the end of November, the mortgage market should round off 2019 having completed one and a half million mortgages in the UK.
If 70% of those are intermediated, that means a whopping 1,050,000 were placed by mortgage brokers.
This got me wondering exactly how those brokers did the research to place those mortgages?
How many of them actually searched criteria before looking up the rate or how many went straight to a product sourcing system?
It may be a presumption, but I’m fairly sure that not all of the mortgages placed in 2019 involved a criteria search.
Therefore, I think it should be the New Year’s resolution of every mortgage adviser to take criteria search seriously.
Far too many brokers think that they have every piece of mortgage criteria from every lender in their heads but, as Knowledge Bank alone holds over 100,000 different criteria, this just isn’t possible.
With the FCA looking at the advice process in depth at the moment, 2020 may well be the year when brokers wished that they had kept more of their research on file than they do currently.
For example, how would someone log the results of a call to a help desk?
Every year more solutions are found online or solved with technology, so my wish for the mortgage market is that those who have not yet embraced the technological solutions available to them, do so this year.
There is no need to do as many things manually any more or to struggle along using old solutions that are no longer fit for purpose.
The ideal resolution for the mortgage market would be to look at the technological solutions available to them, compare them to what they are using currently and ask themselves if what they are using at the moment is really the best it could be.
If the answer is no, the next question is are they therefore doing the very best by their customers?….and by themselves!
In the same way we say it is best for every borrower to receive advice from a qualified mortgage broker; it has to be best advice for every mortgage broker to use the technology available to ensure they really are finding those borrowers the best solution for their circumstances.
