The stamp duty deadline – 31 March – is looming uncomfortably close on the horizon for many in the mortgage industry.

Forget to follow up on one element of the application and paperwork and your client will not benefit from the incentive and may pull out of the purchase.

Looking at the processing logjam that has developed as a result of this big tax giveaway, I fear there will be a significant number of borrowers who will not get over the line in time. The consumer website moneyexpert.com reported at the end of last year that Santander was taking 26 working days to handle landlord mortgages when processed through brokers and 21 days for residential.

We have all read reports of some banks declining cases from those who need to meet the deadline, and many, including HSBC, are refusing to give guarantees that applications will get through in time.

There seems to be just too much paperwork and too little time to wade through it all. It therefore goes without saying that there are going to be intermediaries whose hard work getting deals to work will not be rewarded.

The temporary tax holiday announced by the chancellor has highlighted what many have been pointing out for a number of years – lenders have always found it difficult to respond to surges in their pipeline.

To use a car industry analogy, the production line has one speed and cannot really be adjusted to match changing demand conditions. Periods of high demand just mean longer waits.

I think everyone in the industry needs to ask themself whether this is still an appropriate response. When the internet is meaning almost instant gratification for the consumer in an ever-widening range of goods and services, can we really continue like this?

Given the changes that have been accelerated by the pandemic, I don’t think it can. I am sure its model is viewed by many, particularly the young, as outdated and analogue in what is mostly now a digital world.

We are going to have to accept that the already falling numbers of people who apply for a mortgage in the time-honoured way – by travelling into a broker’s office or a bank branch to arrange a mortgage, for example, is going to fall ever faster and further now that almost every age group is fully on board with new ways of doing things.

Lenders are going to have to re-engineer their back office with this new type of borrower in mind. The imperative that lenders should be working towards now is slashing processing times.

They could make a start at this by tackling the legacy paper trails and armies of people wasting too much time on mundane tasks that have been automated elsewhere via the use of Open Banking and underwriting platforms.

In many sectors, manual intervention is limited to areas where a human touch is actually desirable. For example, in personal loans, the front end of the application process is mostly automated and completed in minutes rather than days. The checks surrounding identification, fraud and affordability are performed automatically in milliseconds.

If lenders do not embrace such technology, I can see borrowers taking matters into their own hands. There is already evidence of this happening.

Lenders that I speak to tell me that there is a significant but growing minority of individuals who pursue multiple applications simultaneously via sourcing platforms. The internet makes this easy and it only leaves a ‘soft’ footprint on their credit file. The footprint cannot be seen by other lenders because it does not classify as a credit search. Only when a full application has been submitted will one appear.

They submit these ‘soft’ applications, sit back and wait for the fasted and most attractive one to come through.

Already there must be a substantial number of wasted applications because of this. And this is only going to get worse as more traffic moves online.

Rishi Sunak’s stimulus, and the backlog that it has prompted, should not be viewed by mortgage lenders as a temporary problem, only to be sorted when demand falls back to lower levels (as I believe it may be). It must be taken as a call to action for those who have for too long allowed their back offices to fall way behind the times.

David Wylie, commercial director, LendingMetrics