Air has made several updates to its Air Sourcing platform to help advisers in addressing the affordability issues faced by their customers.

These changes come in response to the recent rise in inflation and ongoing cost of living crisis, which has placed financial pressure on many borrowers. In order to help advisers assist vulnerable customers facing financial hardship, the changes to Air Sourcing place affordability at the heart of the advice process.

The incoming changes to Air Sourcing include:

• Filtered Search Terms: Advisers will now be able to set payment limits, payments terms, and select what products their clients will be interested in before they search.
• Updated Results Page: A new column, titled ‘Payments’, has been introduced to the results page. The column will display the monthly payment amount required, with icons for products with contracted payments and the payment term.
• Borrowing Forecast Tool: The Borrowing Forecast Tool has been incorporated into these changes, showing a product breakdown using the client’s monthly budget and the impact of the overall cost of borrowing.

Paul Glynn, CEO of Air Group, said: “The past year, filled with economic uncertainty, inflation, and rising living costs, has been particularly hard for many borrowers. This, coupled with new Consumer Duty regulation, has made it more important than ever that advisers are well prepared to support customers in maximizing the benefit of payments they can commit to in order to reduce lifetime borrowing costs

“The newly introduced features to Air Sourcing will make it easier for advisers to search for and evaluate different products in line with payment levels available. In particular, our filtered search terms will consider new solutions coming to the market with committed payments alongside traditional full roll-up products.

“Unique in its market offering, Air Sourcing’s ability to sift data to maximise the use of customer affordability continues to yield surprising and innovative approaches to later life lending that make the most advantage of newer products that have recently joined the market., opening up opportunities for comprehensive conversations between advisers and clients around affordability.

“Not only will this help advisers meet industry standards and better cater to their customers’ financial needs, but it will also save them time, which can be spent having the meaningful conversations that clients require when discussing their borrowing options.”