Clever Lending: Sourcing systems are service providers not decision makers

08 August 2016

Over the last six months it’s clear that MCD has acted as a catalyst for a lot of R&D in ‘fintech’ and in particular sourcing systems for second charges. However, Clever Lending believe that sourcing systems are there to help with the overall service offering, not a solution in themselves.

Lending decisions should still be made by CeMap qualified underwriters, not computers. The new sourcing systems are intermediary friendly tools that will help advisers to quickly search and compare thousands of second charge products in the market and with all intents and purposes, enable them to easily identify further options available to their client.

But it’s the underwriters that ensure the proposed products have a customer orientated focus and provide them with affordable and sustainable outcomes. This is increasingly important with debt consolidation being cited more and more as a decisive factor when selecting a second charge product. Finding a way through the maze of a growing range of second charge products, with lower rates and associated costs, to the client’s circumstances, is therefore more important than ever.

For those master brokers or DAs who don’t invest in the time to consider each case individually, and carefully, lending opportunities could be missed, as most negatives on a case or client profile, need to be fully understood before a final decision is made. Technology can’t always do that, so getting the broker, underwriter and the technology all working together and with the same aims is crucial for the success of these systems. There is a bigger picture with any case, and seeing it all is vital for the correct decisions to be made, not just the decision of one part of the consideration. Situations such as these puts the case down the ‘advised’ route rather than execution only, showing that experienced advice is still crucial even in a technical world.

With first and second charges becoming more aligned and needing to be considered side by side, it made perfect sense that the new regulation kick-started the drive for better sourcing and administrative technology.

Sam Kirtikar, Managing Director of master broker Clever Lending said: “Investing in sourcing systems is clearly a good use of technical spend as it allows master brokers to provide introducers access to their lender panel products via a slick sourcing system and streamlined advised or packaged processes that will help product choice and underwriting during the application process. With that comes the added benefit of increasing awareness of second charges which many brokers and their clients may not have really considered before.

“But each case is unique and there are, more often than not, factors that a system cannot pick up or be flexible towards. Sourcing systems are a very useful tool to increase and illustrate affordable options and when this speed of comparison is backed up by a qualified underwriter we can move towards the goal of providing the most appropriate solution for the client. When launching our own Clever Sourcing system with Mortgage27tech, we ensured that it was always backed up with resource to handle case specifics and with hundreds of brokers already using the system it’s clear that brokers still want a quality, personal service when dealing with important client financial decisions.”