The world has changed beyond recognition since I first thought of writing this article. No one any longer knows what will happen in a couple of days, let alone in a few weeks or months, but I want to focus on the positives and the changes we really can start to predict.

First, the shock of Covid-19, and the almost total shutdown it has resulted in, has brought out the best and the worst in people. It emphasises the need for everybody to work together in co-operation, particularly to support the broker community on whom everybody relies.

It is times like these that make us all realise how central brokers are to our whole mortgage industry. They generate 70 per cent of new business, so lenders rely on them. Tech providers also rely on them and, most of all, so do borrowers who need a robust, healthy and educated broker population to help them with the largest purchase they will ever make.

The shutdown has changed overnight the way we are working. Fortunately, technology has stepped in to help those of us in financial services – and elsewhere – to continue operating. Homeworking has suddenly become the norm, the sale of laptops has gone through the roof and videoconferencing facilities have gained prominence, enabling us to see one another while we are all ‘social distancing’.

Even if we are out of lockdown in fewer than 12 weeks, I believe the changes occurring now will change our working lives forever. Let’s look at a few examples:

The government’s edict that we must practise social distancing with no socialising between households has meant that even companies that would not contemplate homeworking before Covid-19 are now forced to put it into action. People are therefore finding tools, workarounds and ways of functioning that they had never thought possible.

New ‘normal’

A quick Google search reveals it is meant to take an average of 66 days to form a new habit. After 90 days of homeworking, therefore, remote working will have become normal for an awful lot of people. The thought of so many businesses eventually reverting to their  large premises with high rents in cities, and hundreds of people in one location, seems unlikely.

Self-isolation and a huge number of people off sick also mean lenders and networks no longer have the manpower to answer the plethora of calls from brokers and borrowers. This can only drive lenders to consider technological solutions to answer these questions.

Where lenders don’t have all the solutions, tech companies will step in. Once such solutions have then been found and deployed, it is highly unlikely that we will revert to the previously manpower-heavy solutions.

It was precisely to provide this kind of help, to assist both lenders and brokers and to work together as a community, that staff at Knowledge Bank worked through the night after the government first announced that lenders could grant a three-month payment holiday to borrowers. Lenders’ phones lit up the next morning with brokers trying to determine what each lender’s policy was and borrowers trying to find out how they could take advantage of it.

Knowledge Bank therefore designed a live feed to keep track of what every lender was doing, and made it available to brokers free of charge. This not only helps the brokers, because they now have a central source of information, saving them hours of time phoning lenders; it also helps the lenders, by reducing some of the many calls they were receiving. This live feed has been so well received that more than 1,200 brokers have signed up to it in less than a week.

Other examples of this type of altruism are eKeeper teaming up with other tech companies to provide a free CRM system, and free training on various widely available tools, such as Microsoft Teams, to help brokers to work from home and continue to assist their clients. Many brokers in turn have played their part by contacting clients and keeping them updated on a regular basis, making sure they know that help is available.

Although there are always exceptions, these are great examples of the industry pulling together to help one another. Tech companies are upping their game to find new resources for brokers and lenders, and to help everyone continue with their day-to-day income generation, even in these most challenging of times.

At some point these restrictions will be lifted and we will once again go about our day-to-day lives, but again, I think we may find we have a ‘new normal’.

It may well be that the most lasting impact of coronavirus is not a decimation of our population (which, incidentally, means reducing it by one 10th), but a permanent shift in working patterns and a far greater reliance on new forms of technology than anything we have seen to date.

Nicola Firth is founder and chief executive of Knowledge Bank