'Brokers and customers expect accuracy'
The following article was written in association with Paragon Bank.
Technology in the mortgage industry is moving at an unprecedented rate, with both brokers and buyers looking for a seamless experience in a super swift timeline. Research from Smartr365 found that six in 10 brokers believe technology is essential to the sector’s future – while 86% added that it enhances the safety of the mortgage journey compared to archaic paper-based processes.
In that vein, and born out of a desire to deliver a ‘best in class’ experience, Paragon Bank has created a bespoke buy-to-let mortgage application platform. Leveraging AI and data integration, this new platform is designed to provide certainty, transparency and speed for brokers moving into 2025.
Speaking to Mortgage Introducer, Andy Smart (pictured), strategic transformation manager at Paragon Bank, explained that this new platform was built in direct response to brokers’ specific needs and wants – created alongside industry experts, with experts in mind.
“We’ve been collaborative with brokers throughout the whole process in order to build something that meets their needs,” he said. “It’s not off the shelf – we work alongside brokers to understand their pain points and have created something bespoke from that.”
‘Brokers and customers expect accuracy’
At Paragon, they understand buy to let. With over three decades worth of experience, they’ve harnessed their unique position in the market to set out on a transformative technology journey built around both the broker and customer experience.
“Brokers and customers expect accuracy - they already get that from Paragon currently but advances in technology means that we can do far more to increase the certainty of the upfront decision piece,” added Smart.
That core value of certainty is one of three which govern Paragon’s overarching strategy – essentially meaning that, subject to the property assessment, the majority of Paragon’s upfront decisions now will hold true all the way through the process.
“The second value is around transparency,” added Smart. “We know that it's really important to communicate effectively through the process - because brokers are very busy people and they need to know exactly how things are progressing. Our platform really was designed with that in mind.
“Thirdly, we focused on speed. We’re all the same, us consumers. We want immediacy – and so everything around us is available at the click of a button. The expectations of the mortgage world is no different. It's a big thing to buy a house, but people are expecting it at an increasing pace – we also know that brokers are really busy and we need to respond to that demand accordingly.”
Blending human expertise with emerging tech
For Smart and his team, when building out this new platform it was essential to keep their target audience front of mind – as well as utilising the very best tech in a highly ethical way.
“We’ve taken the best of our human expertise and blended it with machine capabilities,” Smart said. “At Paragon, we’re really proud of our skilled underwriting team but we knew we can do more to leverage technology. It's more around the administrative tasks that this comes in, because we want to allow our people to focus on helping brokers with more complex cases.”
It’s a theme that’s recurrent across the sector, with more and more firms opting to rely on smart tech to automate time consuming tasks. At Paragon, they’ve invested in new technologies such as new data connections and APIs so they can do some of the heavy lifting for brokers. One example Smart cites here is pre-populating application data – essentially pre-filling some boxes on applications using data from trusted sources.
“We’ve worked really hard to allow more applicants and more properties on one single application,” he told Mortgage Introducer. “We deal a lot with limited company lending – so we know that you can have up to four directors on one of our applications. Now, however, on the new system you can add all four in one go as well as having multiple properties on there too.”
‘It’s going to be quite an exciting ride’
It’s agility like this that’s shaping the trajectory of the mortgage technology industry at large – with Paragon pre-empting trends that’re still to come down the line.
“Things are moving so quickly in the sector,” added Smart. “It’s going to be quite an exciting ride. There’s a huge buzz around AI – which we’ve already dipped into with our new platform. It’s about easing some of the heavy lifting that the underwriter would do – it’s not about decision making.”
Here, Smart is passionate about Paragon’s relationship with AI – that the tech is a strategic partner not an outright replacement for the human touch.
“We're a specialist – as such I'm cognizant of the types of problem solving we do for brokers and their customers, and you really wouldn't want to experiment on that,” he said. “We need the soft skills of people looking at [AI’s output] and assessing it. We’ve dipped our toe in the water here and we’re actively interested in exploring those opportunities. However, we see AI working alongside our people - almost like a copilot.”
And, in their own technology transformation journey, Paragon is actively looking at new tools on the market with a mind set on expansion though trials, testing and evolution.
“The next stage of our journey is looking at how we enhance this buy-to-let platform,” Smart told Mortgage Introducer. “What’re the next challenges or needs brokers want us to address? As we consider new products and propositions, we will feed that in to the platform and go from there. Watch this space - because over the next 12 months we've got lots of enhancements planned.”
