Specialist lender Together has appointed a former RBS decisioning leader to an automation brief, with a new platform entering testing and a focus on faster decisions for complex cases. Separately, Novus has argued that redesigned mortgage journeys could make underwriting up to 20% faster, while government homebuying reforms are projected to save property businesses £116m annually.
The direction of travel is clear: better data, workflow automation and decision-support tools could reduce friction in applications and property transactions. Yet speed must not come at the expense of explainability, fair treatment or resilience. The Bank of England’s sector-wide cloud-outage simulation is a timely reminder that mortgage firms must understand dependencies on technology providers and retain effective contingency arrangements.
- Ask lenders how automated decisions are reviewed, explained and escalated.
- Maintain documented fallbacks for outages affecting sourcing, CRM, ID or submission tools.
- Monitor whether automation improves outcomes for complex, vulnerable and non-standard clients.