Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity Is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Few would disagree and yet when confronted with the need for change, the comfort blanket of old habits can be a stubborn one to break.

Take, for example, the complicated business of evolving broker distribution strategies and the technology that supports them. Time and time again, research, including our own recently conducted across the lending sector, has shown that processes like broker registrations, sourcing products, Decisions in Principle and even applications can be more vexing for brokers than need be.

Brokers understandably get frustrated with the panoply of processes, entry points to lenders and onboarding systems not to mention having to remain registered on each individual lender’s database. All this is before has requested a Decision in Principle.

Speed of service is crucial even when the motivations for speed change. We saw how important it was during the pandemic in ensuring home-moving chains did not evaporate before buyers’ and sellers’ eyes. But in more recent memory, we have equally seen the ability to quickly secure finance was imperative in the aftermath of the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget of last September.

Getting pricing secured and the right products to the right brokers in a timely fashion matter – not only to brokers but also to lenders – some of whom know too well the cost of being last man standing in a moving market when rates change. Service is destroyed but margins can be irretrievably so – especially if the service backlog is so significant as to make issuing a new product to remediate the damage is nigh on impossible.

To this end, why are some lenders still hamstrung by their processes and making it harder for themselves and their key distributors to do good business? Today there should be no need to re-key – indeed platforms today can reference third party data in real time that could make many of these requests redundant. Interoperability with external data sources, quick product launches and withdrawals, product proposition changes,  and even making agile data capture changes to record new information (particularly considering the future need for compliance with Consumer Duty requirements), are features of systems that are available to everyone if they are prepared to change their way of operating and their platform.

In essence any broker functionality should endeavour to get the most certain decision possible as early as possible without compromising risk decisions for the lender elsewhere in the process. But the need for agile change can manage the evolution of our risk view. There are already rumours that many of the alterations made to affordability calculations employed as a result of the cost-of-living crisis have deselected perfectly good lending opportunities and lenders are scrambling to undo some of these even today.

There is a window now in which to make significant and effective change. The latest generation of cloud-native platforms enable significant evolutions to be readily available and readily amendable to reflect risk appetite to market quickly and at any scale. In a race for market share, which later in the year might be a reality for some who have not met targets in Q1, this kind of competitive agility will matter. This goes beyond lift and shift but will de-risk the lender’s exposure to slow change and improve the broker user experience.

Ahmed Michla, Head of Marketing and Communications,Ohpen