Peter Wright, financial adviser at CBK, said: “As far as I am aware, Nationwide Building Society is the only lender doing this. The reason we faxed the letter in the first place was because sending it through the post was not working as they were being misplaced.
“The letter either stands or it doesn’t. Whether it is faxed or not should not be an issue. Is this really treating customers fairly?”
Commenting on Nationwide’s policy, Rob Griffiths, associate director at AMI, said: “There is no reason why a lender should not accept a letter which the client has signed, whether it is sent by fax, post or e-mail. The whole point is that the lender can see the signature and check it is the same as the ones on
its records.
“The whole issue of not accepting letters sent by fax seems to be about putting obstacles in the way of a client’s request to give access of their details to their intermediary. After all, it is the client who wants the broker to have access to that information and the client is the broker’s customer, not the mortgage lender’s.”
Tamsin Hemsley, press officer at Nationwide, responded: “It is the case that we do not accept AMI client ownership letters by fax, but we are currently reviewing our policy. We have had this system in place for a while now, but will reconsider it, in light of demand from
intermediaries.”
