"It is changing legislation and new functionality that will erode the sales processing further to the target of the 30-minute advised mortgage process and even 20 minutes for remortgages."
Technical innovation in the financial services space generally breaks down into two areas: those that look to replace and those that look to augment. Innovators looking to replace recognise the vast benefits of engaging the mass market where branding and audience building are often associated with fantastical budgets. In many respects, while these organisations grab the headlines they are not a concern to the intermediary world at present – after all they’re looking at a very different market segment. However, those looking to augment intermediaries have to cast their eyes ahead to predict how new and existing technology can effectively come together and deliver real tangible benefits.
We recently vaunted the 30-minute advised mortgage process, a mildly tongue in cheek vision of how technology can reduce the variety of data gathering and tasks performed by advisers and administrators. It recognised the many inefficiencies and disparate systems individuals must engage and how streamlining these would ensure that advisers deliver great client outcomes rather than being slaves to the machine.
In the 360 world, this starts on a foundation of client engagement. It has been proven that clients are willing to engage in the sales process earlier through branded portals for messaging and documentation requests along with a client FactFind for the initial data gathering. Reducing the unnecessary rekeying of data has brought mortgage, protection and GI sourcing into one experience and reuses data across the CRM, the result is that a business finds itself saving time and effort that can be redirected elsewhere. But it is changing legislation and new functionality that will erode the sales processing further to the target of the 30-minute advised mortgage process and even 20 minutes for remortgages.
PSD2 creates the infrastructure to allow Open Banking to become a reality and allow permissive access into consumer bank accounts. Already organisations are reviewing how PFM (Personal Financial Management) can be used in the mortgage processing world. The ability to automatically fill budget planners, allocating the correct spending amounts to the appropriate sections, with automated validation of salary and affordability presents a huge opportunity to reduce data gathering while guaranteeing the trustworthiness of the data. Here Open Banking and other Know-Your-Customer tools, such as ID checking and consumer credit requests, can then be easily delivered directly to the consumer through a client facing branded portal and/or client FactFind. Put simply, more qualified data can now be sourced for less effort from both the adviser and client.
Finally, at the end of the sales process, the ability to submit directly to a lender reduces the processing time even further by simply reusing the data already entered and qualified when collected within the CRM or FactFind. While not all lenders are ready to receive applications in this manner (with reluctance over spammed applications for instance) those that do will be far better placed to reduce the application processing time and guarantee their intermediaries partners a higher level of service.
Technical innovation will continue to deliver and evolve – that is a certainty. We hope it is a pragmatic and considered roadmap, such as the above, where we use what we have built for today with what we’re building into the future, that will deliver genuine returns to intermediaries and their customers.
