The rapid growth of technology in recent years has ushered in a new era for the mortgage market.
Since the onset of Covid-19, technology has proved vital to the industry, helping to speed up and improve the mortgage journey as the property market boomed.
The widespread shift to homeworking and increased demand for houses with home offices and outdoor space during the pandemic, combined with the Government’s stamp duty holiday and record low interest rates, saw mortgage lending soar to record highs and mortgage brokers busier than ever.
As well as enabling brokers to move communication online, technology also gave rise to game-changing developments, from digital application tracking to online fact finds and interactive calculators.
Not only has this enhanced the customer experience, but it has allowed brokers to reduce the time they spend on burdensome administrative tasks and concentrate on servicing more customers.
With demand for property still strong and customer expectations of a seamless, digital experience growing, it’s important that brokerages don’t rest on their laurels.
The past two years have shown the importance of being open to technological innovation and as we move forward, brokerages need to view technology as an ongoing process of improvement, offering new ways to enhance their service and grow their business.
Buy, build or rent
At Smartr365 we are continuously upgrading our features to complement our platform, allowing brokers to pick and choose what they want through our ‘plug and play’ system.
For example, we have formed a partnership with Digidentity for leading digital ID verification and the Smartr365 platform is now integrated across almost 50% of the UK market, including lenders such as Halifax, Barclays, Accord Mortgages, TSB, Leeds Building Society, Aldermore and Nationwide.
Long gone are the days when brokers were at the mercy of bulky, cumbersome solutions; today there are numerous options available and firms have the choice whether to ‘buy, build or rent’ software according to their needs.
As a general rule of thumb, the decision to buy and implement very large, expensive software systems has largely become the reserve of hardware or ‘old school’ solutions and is likely to become an increasingly rare choice in the future.
Brokerages can also opt to build their own tech platform and this has the advantage of being able to seamlessly fit with existing software, while ensuring the firm owns the intellectual property rights. However, it also has its limitations.
What might appear like a straightforward project on the surface can often turn out to be a much larger and costlier undertaking than expected.
Firms will need to continually keep building their own system and this can be challenging to do in-house without the right skills.
Mortgage brokers are, after all, not software technologists, and this can leave systems at the mercy of internal innovation and ability which may be lacking. From a business perspective, the amount of time, money and effort often fails to outweigh the benefits.
In contrast, renting software (SaaS) has become the go-to for many firms, with the old model of buying software giving way to this newer service model. One need only look at the likes of Office365 and Salesforce to see how this method has exploded in popularity since entering the realms of technology.
Since its launch in 1999, Salesforce has become entrenched within most industries. Therefore, the decision to ‘rent’ software is not a particularly new one, but a tried and tested choice for most firms across a wide range of industries. When firms adopt this model, they avoid all the complexities attached to building and integrating different components, while gaining all the benefits of newer, more efficient technology at a lower cost.
Not a binary choice
Ultimately, the decision of what tech to use and what features would be of the most benefit doesn’t need to be a binary choice of buy, build or rent. Rather, brokerages have the option to ‘plug and play’, providing them with the flexibility to adopt as little or as much of an existing tech platform’s functionality as they want and complement it with their own.
Lots of brokerages still view ‘mortgage CRM’ as back-office, adviser or network-facing software but the real benefit for brokers will be in consumer-facing tech and this requires brokerages to be forward-thinking, agile and flexible. It’s much more important to recognise the needs of customers and look at how to service those needs, rather than dictate to them how they should be serviced.
There will of course be components that brokerages want to build and own themselves, but it’s important to remember that brokers are financial services experts, not software providers. Building consumer-facing tech from scratch is not only brutally expensive but it requires ongoing internal innovation to meet ever-changing customer needs and demand.
It can therefore be much more effective for brokerages to customise parts of the mortgage journey in line with their services, combining those with pre-existing elements that are already proven to work.
At Smartr365, our ethos of ‘plug and play’ means we partner with all the technology brokers are used to using and blend it together in our platform to make day-to-day business quicker and more efficient. Recent feature integrations include Open Banking and credit reports, the latter of which we will supplement in due course with the integration of work reports.
For our Homebuyer app, we recently launched new features, including ID verification, status updates and home valuation.
Keeping pace with consumer demand in the mortgage industry is paramount and being able to continually improve and update systems to make each step of the mortgage journey better is what will keep mortgage brokers one step ahead.
Of course, that’s not to say that full automation is the future, with many consumers still expecting to be able to seek advice or support from a person at some point in the mortgage process. However, technology is there to do much of the heavy lifting, enabling brokers to channel their time and effort into a customer-facing role.
Conor Murphy is CEO of Smartr365
