SmartrFit aims to provide brokers with information on which lenders meet their clients’ specific circumstances and the maximum loan amount they would offer.
Using the established technology from Legal & General’s SmartrCriteria tool, the new offering utilises lenders’ own affordability and lending criteria, helping advisers find the right products quickly and accurately.
SmartrFit also carries out 11 intuitive criteria checks when calculating affordability to determine whether a particular lender matches the borrower’s requirements.
Advisers are also able to further refine suitability by inserting additional criteria of their choice, to enhance and customise results.
What’s more, the tool allows advisers to see why a particular lender was a match, which helps to evidence selections for particular products. SmartrFit will first launch for residential mortgages, with buy to let mortgages following early next year.
Kevin Roberts, director of Legal & General Mortgage Club said: “The pandemic has created a lot of uncertainty for advisers as lending requirements and criteria have drastically changed.
“Advisers want accurate tools they can trust to help them provide the best service to their clients and provide quick outcomes for them.”
Legal & General said the launch of SmartrFit marked the next step in a technology journey for the mortgage industry.
It said SmartrFit would provide more certainty for advisers and increase operational efficiencies at what was a very busy time for the industry.
“Technology has the power to change our market for the better. Tools like SmartrFit will help to create operational efficiencies for our market, while giving advisers and lenders valuable insights and data to help improve the services they provide,” Roberts added.
Delays
A survey by Legal & General Mortgage Club found since the reopening of the mortgage market, 37% of advisers said a typical mortgage application was taking at least four weeks to move from application to offer.
Pre-pandemic, almost half of advisers (49%) said straightforward cases were only taking one to two weeks. For more complex cases, 44% of advisers said it is taking at least six weeks to offer since the re-opening of the mortgage market.
It thought one of the reasons for these delays had been the result of keeping up with ever-changing product criteria as lenders withdrew and relaunched products to market due to the impact of Covid-19.
With SmartrFit, lenders could add, amend and verify the data themselves so advisers could be assured of the accuracy of the results and quickly find the right solutions for their clients.
