The culture that sits behind ‘Customer first’ is exacting. It requires every part of your business to constantly ask: is this in the best interests of our customers? And it requires people to let go of prior systems and ways of doing business that are now arcane, in order to deliver a better future.

In the mortgage industry, the question of how to ensure we all put the end customer first is even more complex given the interplay of technology providers, advisers and lenders.

If these past 12 months have given me anything, it is a sense of perspective. The physical distance from being in the office has given me a chance to look at our business differently. However, as we move towards the end of lockdown, the talk of a ‘return’ to normal makes me wonder if we aren’t all missing a trick in how we can work together to ensure that the whole industry delivers a customer-first approach.

Standard application data

Let’s say we started a new mortgage industry today. What would we keep from the old one? What would we lay to rest? For example, if we started afresh, wouldn’t we want a standard set of application data that every customer knew they must provide in order to enable a lender to make a decision, instead of the myriad of opaque rules and data points that exists today?

Perhaps that time, and indeed the time for more collaboration across the industry as a whole, has come.

There’s nothing technological stopping us from agreeing a core set of standards, for example. There’s nothing so unique about the mortgage industry that it can’t emulate the successes of other industries such as aviation, computing, mobile, pensions and even education where data model issues have been dealt with.

What I do know is that, if we don’t grasp this challenge, someone else will. Our industry may be huge and have deep pockets, but it’s not immune to disruption. And, right now, somebody somewhere is building that disruptive model.

What makes me so sure? First, the conditions are right. Good people create new businesses in challenging economic times. Uber, Groupon, Instagram, Airbnb, Slack and Netflix were all begun during a recession.

Second, people have little or nothing to lose; angel dollars are awash, and they want to invest in the next big thing.

Third, the prize is too big. If someone can overhaul how the housing and mortgage markets work, they don’t need a large market share to become potentially very profitable.

Fourth, it’s already happening. We’ve seen end-to-end offerings emerge, and data-led property and mortgage businesses. They’ll be mainstream within a couple of years, in my opinion.

Established players

But maybe, just maybe, we’re more like the automotive industry? Established players with a lot of leverage, ripe for driverless cars and electric disruption. But, despite the growth of Tesla, the business of selling large volumes of electric cars will likely remain delivered by the established names of BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen in collaboration with tech partners rather than in competition with them.

I hope the same is true for mortgages, that we get to determine our own destiny and not at the hands of the disruptors. The window for that opportunity, however, is closing. Who’s with us?

James Tucker is chief executive of Twenty7Tec