The statement is a response to the solutions being offered to mortgage lenders by other sourcing systems designed to protect them against the proposed regulation as set out in Section 4.7 of CP98, which holds lenders responsible for the accuracy of the pre-application illustrations issued by intermediaries to their clients.
Peter Gladdy, national sales manager at Network Data, said: "Ifonline, as well as other parties, seems to be talking about being a single data source for the whole industry and a panacea for the woes of the lending industry. But this is nonsense. The proposition that such a single data source can guarantee the accuracy of all pre-application illustrations is fatally flawed because it only considers one half of the full story. The other half is the integrity of the sourcing system that interprets the data, and then proceeds to create and print the client specific pre-application illustration."
Network Data claims to have developed a formal test procedure - the Mortgage Audit Pack – which is a generic test pack that focuses on the intricacies of the lender’s own mortgage products and can be used to test the integrity of all sourcing systems.
The Audit Pack is a set of case scenarios which will be prepared for each lender and will exam the criteria of each of their mortgage products. Network Data plans to carry out its own tests on each of the case scenarios, and the results can then be compared to the lender’s own in-house system, or can be used as a benchmark to measure the integrity of other sourcing systems.
Gladdy said: "It is a better solution because it addresses the end result – the content of the pre-application illustration, not just the data that feeds into it. Secondly, it has generic solutions that can be applied across the board to all desktop mortgage sourcing systems and web-based mortgage sites. Thirdly, it does not involve the lenders sinking money into technology at a time when most will be severely stretched to get their own in-house systems to comply with the regulations and, lastly, we will prepare it free of charge for the lenders."
