We’ve long known that the housing and mortgage market is resilient. Most of us have seen it survive M-day, a global financial crisis, the European Mortgage Credit Directive, the Mortgage Market Review, Brexit, and now a global pandemic. I’d even say some of us have thrived; and, through necessity, we’ve all adapted.

The size, scale and speed of change the industry has delivered in 12 months is staggering, and we should all applaud the Herculean effort it took to change everything about how we work. From everyone working at home (or living at work) to implementing video-conferencing solutions, setting up online workspaces, finally ditching paper and embracing digital services, our industry bears no resemblance to the one we thought so normal this time last year.

We’ve proved that not only can we embrace technology but we can harness it to make our lives and our customers’ mortgage experiences easier. So imagine what we could do if we really put our minds to it.

Could 2021 be the year when we move the whole industry from delivering technology and process improvements to driving genuine digital innovation? When I say ‘digital’, I don’t mean Zoom instead of face-to-face contact, or photo identity documents instead of paper — those developments are an evolutionary step forward but they’re not digital transformation. Being truly digital means creating a technology-led solution that generates, stores and processes a transaction using nothing but data.

Shift in thinking

This kind of thinking is a radical mindset and cultural shift from what we have today. We’ve only just started to tap into the potential of application programming interfaces, and integrating our systems to share data more effectively. But reimagining our entire end-to-end mortgage process as a customer-driven data flow takes serious vision, creative thinking and a huge amount of collaboration.

Take something as simple as proving a customer’s identity. Covid has forced the adoption of photo or scanned uploading of identity documents, which is a positive step, but the process is essentially the same as it was with the paper document; all we’ve done is make it electronic. To truly transform this process to digital, we need to tap into the identity data at source, setstandards for the data to be authenticated, not just validated, and build a framework so that one authentication can be trusted by every party in the chain. The good news is that we have a government and industry working group doing exactly that.

The Digital Identity Working Group brings together the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, HM Land Registry, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, the Law Society, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and the business leaders we need to collaboratively build an industry-wide solution. We’re making strong progress and, if we get this right, we’ll have the perfect blueprint to replicate this level of digital transformation across our other processes.

Data and collaboration are the key to any successful digital venture, so the silos we’ve worked under in the past will not take us into the future. This is the perfect time to extend our new ways of working into the creation of steadfast ecosystems, where we break down our relationship and technological barriers to forge one mortgage and housing community that intrinsically reimagines and redesigns our existing processes to become truly customer first.

However, ‘customer first’ and ‘data driven’ do not mean the end of our human touch; in fact, the opposite. Harnessing source data, intelligent tools and digital solutions removes our manual and time-consuming activities, and it de-risks our processes. It frees up our human capital and emotional capacity to do what we do best — build relationships with our customers and each other on a personal level — and creates the space to understand the emotional factors that are so much more than the transactional stuff we need to know.

Removing the days, weeks and months of manual interventions and frustrating dead time that are inherent in our current processes will not only transform the customer experience, it will transform us too. Realising the savings in time and money, and improving risk, are all nice side-effects, but shifting our entire mindset and industry culture to ‘digital first’ is no longer a pipe dream. It’s here now, and ready for us to grab with both of our carefully sanitised hands.

Maria Harris is director of Digital Cat Consultancy