The Regulator Is Asking What Good Looks Like. Mortgage Brokers Should Answer Before Someone Else Does
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. […]
Why Your Clients Are Quietly Borrowing Twice
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 […]
The EU AI Act is being delayed. What that means for UK businesses
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 […]
What the Asilomar AI Principles are, and why they still matter
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 […]
How gradient descent works, and why it sits underneath every modern AI system
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 […]
Recursive self-improvement in AI, and why we should care
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 […]
Why a quiet appointed representative is now the FCA’s first question
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 […]
The human adviser in an AI mortgage market
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 […]
Basel 3.1: The Regulation Coming Over the Hill
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 […]
How conversational AI actually happened, told through the people who made it
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 […]