Use technology to re-build the market
Posted on August 2nd 2010
It was good to see Halifax launch their new intermediary online system recently, as the number of lenders investing capital in new systems is few and far between. In difficult economic times the natural tendency is to conserve as much money as possible and along with the marketing budget, the IT budget is one of the first to get the chop.
I am a big advocate of using technology intelligently to improve efficiency whilst at the same time making the end user’s life as straight forward as possible. The feedback I get from brokers about online mortgage platforms is that they need to give quick decisions, be easy to navigate around, have live case tacking updates and generally have useful information to hand. This is an area where we too have invested a lot of time and effort in ensuring that what brokers want is what we deliver.
We have also just completed an exciting development which should help us all, it is based on making our mortgage platforms available to third parties and this including origination through intermediaries. I often talk about the lack of funding currently available for mortgages and this is a different way to tackle the same problem. If we can make it easy for new money to enter the UK mortgage space by the efficient and intelligent use of technology maybe we will be able to find new ways to help rebuild our mortgage market.
