MOVING MORTGAGES FORWARD: LENDING ROADBLOCKS AND HOW TO BUILD A BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Richard Morgans, General Manager, UK&I at Mambu

 

Would you take out a mortgage with a lender that leaves you waiting for weeks? Or keeps coming back with additional requests after you’ve submitted your application? Probably not, and you’d be wise not to.

Buying a house is considered one of life’s most stressful events, even without the burden of a complicated mortgage process. So it’s no surprise that people have high expectations when it comes to their lending provider – especially first-time buyers.

Modern technologies have led to faster and more seamless financial services, yet traditional lenders are struggling to keep up with the shift in consumer choice and expectations. Barriers to digitalisation prevent them from being able to meet changing customer needs. To better understand the challenge lenders face and identify solutions, Mambu conducted a study in partnership with Whitecap Consulting, drawing on interviews with senior function heads at ten leading mortgage lenders and building societies in the UK.

What’s the challenge and how can it be fixed?

 

Left behind by legacy systems

A dependency on manual and disjointed processes is holding traditional lenders back. Despite processes moving online, according to the study nine out of ten function heads interviewed reported that their organisation had little to no automation in place, with many specialist lenders still leaning on human underwriting to support their lending decisions. In short, outdated systems and old-fashioned processes.

Manual data entry can lead to duplication. This compromises data accuracy while creating slow and complex processes for regulatory compliance, which requires continuous monitoring, auditing and reporting. Meanwhile, systems that are poorly integrated without proper API capabilities make it difficult to extract data and deliver new micro-services from legacy platforms.

 

Customers are bearing the brunt

As well as creating costly inefficiencies for lenders, legacy processes are taking a toll on the customer experience. From the moment a customer agrees to a new product, confirmation often takes two to three weeks – many times due to complex internal systems that do not link effectively with marketing and communications. As a result, customers are forced to bounce between digital and physical touchpoints when lenders don’t have the facility, processes or security to fulfil requests in a single channel.

This is stifling innovation, causing a lack of choice for customers that they may be able to get elsewhere. To remain competitive, lenders should continually diversify their offers to accommodate new and changing consumer needs. This means the ability to build new products on the fly without taking on excessive costs or risk; and the ability to move fast is key, as there’s little point in adding a feature to solve a problem if it becomes available six months after the problem occurs.

True flexibility requires lenders to rebuild micro-services and test them over and over again to reach the right result – and this testing needs to be automated. Rebuilding is challenging as, while back-end configuration can be tweaked, the ‘plumbing’ remains fairly static. In most instances there is no access to APIs to carry these changes through. This means that product level changes, such as introducing savings pots or goals, would require a core banking system change – and this can’t happen overnight.

 

Transform or tinker?

The findings from Mambu’s Making Mortgages Move Forward study show that current systems are simply not able to deliver the levels of functionality and innovation that today’s home buyers expect.

However, legacy doesn’t have to mean that lenders come last. Small changes have the potential to make big differences in the way that they operate and serve their customers. A new generation of cloud-native, SaaS lending and banking platforms are available. The right platform has the potential to revolutionise workflows and sky-rocket innovation within the mortgage sector, allowing lenders to provide more accessible and commercially competitive services.

These platforms use powerful APIs to connect and unify channels and third-party services, allowing legacy lenders to build on existing brand trust to create products and services that benefit both their customers and themselves. By allowing automation to be applied throughout user journeys, they can help lenders reduce manual tasks to cut costs, time and potential errors – freeing up advisors to focus on advice over admin.

 

Final thoughts
Composability is the key to successful digitisation. The study also found that the biggest challenges traditional lenders face when it comes to digital transformation are that it’s too risky, expensive and time consuming. Mambu’s composable approach to core banking allows institutions to pick and choose the components they need, so they can enhance functionality by bolting on new capabilities as required. All while enabling a faster time to market for new products and maintaining reasonable costs and risk.

There’s a need for change. Legacy processes and systems are stifling innovation and costing mortgage lenders customers, at a time when competition is fiercer than ever. But, rather than fear falling behind, these organisations should relish the opportunity to revolutionise the way they operate. There’s no need for a system overhaul or to start from scratch – instead, we’re entering the age of composing a best-in-class infrastructure to drive incremental improvements. So, where shall we begin?

 

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