At a recent event for our nearly 100 team members, I asked how many of them had still been at school or university at the time of the last financial crisis, in 2008. The answer was just over a third.

I suspect that figure is now reflected in much of the mortgage market. The average age of employees at adviser firms and lenders has surely been getting lower since 2008. Indeed, the experiences of the turmoil in financial markets at the end of September will have been new to many.

It seems we remain at the beginning of the technology adoption cycle

As a result of this gradual decrease in average age, we have been lucky enough to see some exceptional business leaders emerge from this new generation. It is those as a group who now have a chance to both steer their business through the crisis and set the tone for what comes next for our industry.

High demand

While many no doubt are in the throes of combating the challenges this new financial crisis has caused, the situation also presents an opportunity to identify clearly where we can improve our businesses. Inevitably, the stresses and strains of high demand will always highlight where your systems and processes work well, and where they do not.

Many people (me included) have advocated the wider adoption of technology at pace across the mortgage and property markets

For example, the processes that lenders and sourcing system providers go through together to get product information to market are antiquated. This is 2022 — we should not be relying on employees to manually enter product and criteria data into any system.

We need to find a way to automate the transfer of accurate data from lender to adviser systems. This would enable lenders to add, amend and remove products from the market in real time during the day, ensuring advisers and customers were always operating with the correct information to hand.

Expect lenders and sourcing system providers to be collaborating on this shortly.

Further, although mortgage product numbers have dropped to below 12,000, this still seems an extraordinarily high number of products on sale from the 100-plus lenders in the market. We need to use data analytics to create better-targeted product ranges, rather than a broad-brush approach to cover all possible areas of demand. A move to customer-specific pricing in certain circumstances seems likely to be accelerated.

We need to find a way to automate the transfer of accurate data from lender to adviser systems

In late September we saw daily mortgage searches in our platform exceed 100,000 for the first time. Of this volume, over 54% were for remortgages — a far higher percentage than normal and a trend that is likely to continue.

Yet the process of remortgaging remains incredibly complex and time consuming, taking on average four to eight weeks. The whole market will now likely double down on its efforts to better use data and API (application programming interface) connectivity to shorten the time it takes for customers to get a mortgage.

Land registry

We recently saw HM Land Registry announce its Strategy 2022+ — a plan to guide the next stage of its digital transformation — promising to transform land registration in England and Wales, cutting delays for customers and influencing the market to realise the potential of digital tools.

Property transactions are currently taking a record time to complete and this initiative should be welcomed. We may even see an acceleration in timelines for implementing some of the actions.

Many people (me included) have advocated the wider adoption of technology at pace across the mortgage and property markets; yet it seems we remain at the beginning of the adoption cycle.

We should not be relying on employees to manually enter data

Maybe the turmoil in financial markets can act as a catalyst for meaningful and positive change. Maybe this is indeed the end of the beginning, and a more technologically sophisticated mortgage market will emerge from this period.

I certainly hope so.

James Tucker is chief executive of Twenty7Tec