In the spring of 1992, Steve Jobs stood in front of a lecture hall of MIT Sloan students and opened his talk not with a product demo, not with the NeXT story, but with someone else’s book. The full recording sits on MIT’s official YouTube channel, and about three and a half minutes in, Jobs […]

by Liz Syms, CEO, Connect for Intermediaries I recently had the opportunity to attend the FCA’s SME Finance Tech Sprint Showcase Day, focused specifically on SME lending innovation. It was

By Liz Syms — Co founder of mortgagelab.ai, CEO of Connect for Intermediaries, Chair of the Society of Mortgage Professionals. I read the recent Aveni article about ‘Hazel’ which launched

Picture the sort of institutions that almost never agree on anything. HSBC. Lloyds. NatWest. The London Stock Exchange Group. Now picture them sitting around the same table, not to lobby a regulator or carve up a market, but to help design an artificial intelligence model. From the ground up. On British soil. That is roughly […]

Every time you tap your card to pay for a coffee, you are trusting a rule that nobody in the queue could name. Not a law. A standard. A technical agreement, hammered out years ago in a committee room somewhere, that decided how the chip in your card talks to the reader on the counter. […]

Eighteen months ago, Together Money published a five-year outlook for the specialist lending market, built around analysis from Rob Thomas, a former Bank of England economist. It forecast total UK lending rising from £224bn to £315bn by 2029, a 41% gain. Specialist lending, the report predicted, would grow even faster, from £32bn to £54bn, a […]

Demis Hassabis published a manifesto this morning. The co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and by most measures the person closest to the frontier of artificial intelligence, set out his view on where the technology is heading and what ought to be done about it. The essay covers AGI timelines, […]

The FCA has published the findings of the Mills Review. For anyone in financial services who hasn’t read it yet, I’d suggest making time. Buried inside the regulatory language is a question that should keep every mortgage intermediary in the country thinking: by 2030, who will control the primary customer relationship? The review, led by […]

The FCA just published a document that describes a future where your client’s AI agent manages their mortgage, their savings, their insurance and their investments without them lifting a finger. It is called the Emerging Technology Horizon Scan 2026, it landed in June, and it is worth reading carefully. Not because it should worry you. […]

Think about the last purchase that collapsed on you. The client who had waited months, the chain that held together right up until the week someone at the top decided they were not moving after all. You did everything right. The offer was sound, the case was packaged, the lender was ready. And it still […]

I got curious about a number this week. If the human brain has roughly 100 trillion synapses, and each synapse is loosely analogous to a parameter in an artificial neural network, what does that tell us about where AI actually stands? The short answer: further away from the human brain than most headlines suggest, and […]

The FCA just sat down with KPMG and a room full of financial services practitioners to talk about AI regulation. Not in the abstract, future-gazing sense that these conversations usually take. In the practical, operational, what-are-you-actually-doing-about-it sense. The timing matters. KPMG’s joint webinar with the International Regulatory Strategy Group landed in June 2026, the same […]

A junior solicitor at one of the country's best-known law firms recently asked an AI to help with a point of insolvency law. The AI gave a clear, confident answer. It quoted the exact wording of a rule, set out neatly as if lifted straight from the statute book. The lawyer put that wording in […]

At 5:21pm Eastern Time on Friday 12 June, the US Commerce Department told Anthropic to disable Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 immediately, and to bar access by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. Some context on those two names. Mythos 5 is the full-strength model, so capable that Anthropic […]

Twenty-eight million. That is the number of UK adults who now use AI tools to help manage their money, according to Lloyds Banking Group’s Consumer Digital Index, the country’s largest study of digital and financial capability. Personal finance is the nation’s number one use of AI. Not writing emails, not generating images, not summarising meeting […]

Somewhere in the Nevada desert, a datacenter the size of a small town is drawing enough electricity to power Birmingham. It is one of dozens being built across America right now, each one a cathedral of silicon and cooling water, erected in the name of artificial intelligence. The price tag for this construction programme? North […]

Earlier this year Anthropic built a model so good at breaking into software that it decided not to release it. The model, referred to as Mythos, can read a codebase, find the weaknesses, and chain them together into a working attack on its own. In testing it succeeded around 72% of the time. The version […]

Eleven days before I wrote about the coming wave of AI-driven cyber attacks, the Bank of England, the FCA and HM Treasury quietly published a joint statement saying broadly the same thing. It landed without much noise on 15 May. If your inbox missed it, you are not alone. Most of the boards I work […]

A Sky News piece this week put a number on something the AI labs have been hinting at for months. We may have six to twelve months to harden critical software before AI-driven cyber attacks reach a scale we have never faced. The trigger is a new generation of models. Anthropic released one earlier this […]

In the space of 24 hours this week, the chief executives of HSBC and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in Europe and the largest in the United States, both stood in front of their own people and said something striking. Not striking because it was new. Striking because they said it out loud. AI is […]

The FCA has opened something called the AI Input Zone, and most mortgage brokers will never hear about it. That is the problem. It is not a consultation on draft rules. There is nothing to object to, no proposal to push back on. The regulator is doing something quieter and, in its way, more consequential. […]

The second charge mortgage market just had its best month since the eve of the financial crisis. In March 2026, lenders advanced £228 million across 4,129 new agreements. That is the highest monthly figure since February 2008, and it represents a 36 per cent jump in value on the same month a year earlier. Over […]

In November of last year, the European Commission published a paper called the Digital Omnibus. Buried in it was a proposal that would delay the most consequential parts of the EU AI Act by almost eighteen months. Last Thursday, after months of trilogue negotiations, EU lawmakers reached a provisional agreement to do exactly that. The […]

In the first week of January 2017, the most influential people working in artificial intelligence gathered at a small conference centre on the California coast. Asilomar is the kind of place that hosts academic retreats and yoga weekends. For three days that month, it hosted what may have been the most consequential meeting about AI […]

The algorithm that powers every AI tool you have used this year is older than the personal computer, the internet and the mobile phone. It was first described by the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy in 1847. It is called gradient descent. And once you understand it, a lot of the magic around large language models […]

In October 2017, DeepMind published a paper that should have unsettled more people than it did. Their system, AlphaGo Zero, had learned the ancient game of Go from scratch. No human games as input. No opening theory. No strategic guidance. Just the rules. After three days of playing itself, it beat the version that had […]

An appointed representative tells its network principal, soon after onboarding, that it does not intend to carry out any regulated activity. The principal keeps the AR on the Financial Services Register for over a year, waiting for the contractual end date to roll around before terminating. The FCA has just confirmed, in print, that this […]

NatWest’s decision to place home-buying guidance inside ChatGPT is a story with large implications. It shows how quickly the first conversation about a mortgage can move away from a branch, a broker website, or a phone call, and into a digital channel that feels immediate, conversational and cheap. As I know from experience, first conversations […]

Somewhere in the small Swiss city of Basel, inside a circular tower overlooking the Rhine, a committee of central bankers has been quietly reshaping the rules of global finance for half a century. What they’ve decided is now about to land squarely on the UK lending market, and if you’re advising clients on mortgages, you […]

When ChatGPT landed in November 2022 and a hundred million people signed up in two months, most of us had never heard of Ilya Sutskever. Eighteen months later, the same name was on the front page of the Financial Times because he had voted to fire Sam Altman at OpenAI. The board reversed itself within […]

Three weeks ago, the FCA was being hauled over the coals for handing a chunk of its most sensitive customer data to Palantir. The Guardian reported the regulator had agreed to pay the controversial US firm more than £30,000 a week to train an AI system on case intelligence files, fraud reports, consumer complaints, phone […]

There is a document sitting on the FCA’s website, published this week, that could reshape how every mortgage in the UK is originated over the next five years. It is called the Open Finance Roadmap. It is not a consultation paper or a vague statement of intent. It is a plan, with timelines, named use […]

Every team has one. The person who notices that two departments are building towards completely different outcomes and quietly sorts it out before anyone else even realises there’s a problem. The person who onboards the new joiner properly, not just with a laptop and a login, but with the context they actually need. The person […]

Two per cent. That’s how much the average UK business spends on AI as a proportion of revenue, according to a new study from PwC. The global leaders, companies in the top 20 per cent of AI-driven performance, spend five per cent. And they’re getting 15 per cent back. UK firms get 10. You could […]

There’s an article doing the rounds called “The Intelligence Curse” by Luke Drago. It’s been widely shared, hotly debated, and if you work in any industry where relationships drive revenue, it deserves your attention. Not because it’s necessarily right about everything, but because the question it asks is one that every leader in financial services […]

John Lewis has quietly written off £22 million on its failed build-to-rent venture. The scheme, launched in 2020 with ambitions to build 10,000 rental homes, was scrapped in February after the economics stopped working. Architectural designs, planning applications, site preparation, all of it written down to zero. For a partnership that reported £13.4 billion in […]

The most striking detail from last week’s Anthropic announcement isn’t that their new model, Claude Mythos Preview, found a 27-year-old security vulnerability in a major operating system. It isn’t that the model identified thousands of critical zero-day flaws across every major OS and web browser in a matter of weeks, work that would take the […]

For a rule that has shaped UK mortgage lending since 2014, the loan-to-income flow limit has always been a slightly odd creature. Simple on the surface, a cap on how many mortgages at 4.5 times income or above any single lender could write, but quietly distorting in practice. Lenders built management buffers beneath the 15% […]

The Renters’ Rights Act is set to come into force in May, and it represents one of the most significant shifts in the UK rental market in decades. For mortgage advisers and brokers working with landlord clients, understanding these changes is essential. What is changing? The headline change is the abolition of Section 21 — […]

I watched a talk by Rory Sutherland recently that stopped me mid-scroll. If you know Rory, you know he has a way of saying things that sound provocative until you realise they’re just obviously true. This one hit home because it described something I’ve watched happen across the mortgage industry for years, and I suspect […]

The Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee has just confirmed that the UK banking system is resilient. Banks can weather extreme stress. That is good news. Except here is the awkward bit: the very capital rules that prove resilience are now starving the mortgage market of funds. On the same day the FPC published its […]

The Bank of England published its Financial Policy Committee Record this morning. If you’ve seen the headlines, you’ll know the number: 1.3 million additional households now facing higher mortgage costs because of the conflict in the Middle East. That’s the number that made the front pages. But the report itself tells a far more interesting […]

Nobody in UK financial services seriously doubts that AI is changing things. The question that has been hanging in the air for the last couple of years is whether the regulator is keeping pace, or whether it is watching from a comfortable distance and hoping the existing rulebook holds. On 27 January 2026, the FCA […]

In 2025, a 19-year-old Italian kid called Kimi Antonelli climbed into a Mercedes Formula 1 car and promptly started crashing it. He crashed in practice sessions. He crashed a rare Mercedes-AMG road car. He made mistakes that, in most high-pressure environments, would have earned him a very public dressing down and a ticket back to […]

There is a question that gets asked in boardrooms, management offsites, and leadership programmes all over the country, and it almost always gets the wrong answer. The question is: where does culture come from? The wrong answer, the one you hear most often, is that culture is something you build from the bottom up. That […]

There is a question that gets asked in boardrooms, management offsites, and leadership programmes all over the country, and it almost always gets the wrong answer. The question is: where does culture come from? The wrong answer, the one you hear most often, is that culture is something you build from the bottom up. That […]

Weekly intelligence for mortgage professionals, compiled by Paul Brett. Lead Story: FCA Chief Signals a New Era for Mortgage and Retirement Advice On 20 March 2026, FCA Chief Executive Nikhil Rathi delivered what is likely to prove one of the most consequential speeches for mortgage professionals in recent years. Speaking at the JP Morgan Pensions […]

Beyond the Job Title: What a Mortgage Strategy Consultant Really Does If you’ve come across the term “mortgage strategy consultant” and wondered what it actually means in practice, you’re not alone. It’s not a role you’ll find on a standard org chart, and it doesn’t come with a neat job description from the FCA handbook. […]

Last Thursday, the head of the FCA stood up at the JP Morgan Pensions and Savings Symposium and dropped a line that deserves more attention than it got. “If we continue to treat pensions, mortgages and savings as separate tracks, we will miss opportunities to help consumers get where they need to be.” Read that […]

There is a version of history where the UK mortgage market regulated itself, policed by gentlemen’s agreements, voluntary codes, and the quiet assumption that lenders and brokers would do the right thing. That version of history ended on 31 October 2004. But to understand why that day mattered, you need to understand what came before […]

What if your next job offer included a token budget alongside your salary? That question felt outlandish until last week, when Jensen Huang walked onstage at GTC 2025 and made a case that AI tokens will become “the single most valuable commodity in the world.” Here’s what caught my attention: OpenClaw & NemoClaw NVIDIA released […]

The Complexity of the UK Mortgage Industry The UK mortgage industry is no stranger to complexity. From regulation and compliance to margin pressure, fragmented systems, and lengthy application journeys, the

The world of online search is changing. It is no longer just about Google; brokers now need to consider social media searches, and increasingly, AI search. Searches by large language

Introduction Global headlines about artificial intelligence can feel distant from daily mortgage work. Stories about American tech giants spending billions or Chinese breakthroughs in robotics are eye-catching yet easy to

Introduction For many small mortgage businesses artificial intelligence still feels like something distant. It is easy to imagine that only the big lenders or corporate brokerages have the money and

Introduction  When people talk about AI in property, most think of mortgage sourcing or client facing apps. But some of the most profound changes are happening behind the scenes, in

Figures and guidance checked 22 July 2026. Introduction If you work in the mortgage industry or an associated sector such as surveying or conveyancing, “AI” can still sound like something

Introduction: Beyond the Chatbot When most people think of Generative AI, they picture public chatbots and a frantic, high-stakes “AI race” between global tech giants. The media narrative is one

Large banks and insurers often look rock solid on cybersecurity, from the outside it feels like they run fortress technology with endless budgets and elite teams. The reality is a

The rapid evolution of technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, is reshaping the UK mortgage market in many ways. Mortgage advisers need to be at the forefront of this transformation, and

The Mortgage Professional’s Guide to Prompt & Context Engineering Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a concept for our sector; it is beginning to reshape how mortgage professionals operate across

AI continues to take shape in the UK mortgage market. As AI reshapes the market, it is now a necessity to understand how AI can help mortgage advisers. As we