The mortgage industry can draw on parallels with the banking sector in terms of digital innovation, the MIT Live conference was told.

Mortgage Advice Bureau group chief operating officer Yaiza Luengo said “People are using phones for day-to-day banking. Creating digital experiences that are personal to them. They have seen improved standards of operating.

“They expect to know exactly how much they can borrow. They can expect to get a credit card in seven seconds. Could we do that with mortgages? And those are the parallels here, that we can move to those highly personalised journeys.”

Mortgage Brain chief operating officer Cloë Atkinson said it was customers and their expectations that was driving the push to digital. And for brokers AI represented a cultural mind-shift in that they want to understand how it can change their business – and that the present time represented a tipping point.

The transformation to digital, according to Luengo, means brokers moving “from guessing to knowing. And it is data that gives you this ‘knowing’, identifying trends and offering predictions. Essentially it thinks what customers need before they need it”.

“Sometimes we’re creating journeys that are one size fits all, but data changes that. Data gives you facts. It gives you actual knowing, gives you trends. It can give you predictions, can give you propensity, and it allows us to think about customer needs before they need it, but also have just greater predictability and be able to see trends that maybe the human eye wouldn’t see.”

She added: “I mean, we can run a model with 200 different personas. That is hugely helpful. I mean, I can’t keep 200 people in my brain.”

As to why some digital transformations fail, Atkinson said it relied on discipline and adaptability – and ensuring this is weaved through everything you do. In terms of investment, she recently money had been spent in silos on individual pieces of tech.

“And actually, unless we use kind of agnostic connectivity pipework to hook all of that technology together, we’re not actually, as an industry, seeing the value coming through.”

Another question from the floor was whether AI would ultimately lead to the demise of mortgage brokers. Atkinson’s response was an unequivocal no – stressing that other professions had embraced AI such as healthcare, but this hadn’t replaced doctors.

“With mortgages, there is so much choice out there, so you need the human in the room. AI enables the analysis of patterns that a human cannot do on their own – it is an effectively a collaboration with AI.”