Darlington Building Society is implementing a new assisted underwriting platform to speed up decisioning and support the lender’s focus on customer service.

The mutual lender is phasing-in LendingMetrics’ Auto Decision Platform (ADP) in order to allow its team of underwriters to focus on areas that require more of their skills and maintain a personal touch in their decisioning.

ADP’s introduction will see Darlington utilise intelligent decisioning technology, supported by Open Banking data. Among the benefits will be a reduction in time-to-decision, without the need for standardised lending, and immediate application feedback for brokers.

The building society was introduced to the benefits of ADP by financial services provider Iress, who commended ADP’s ease of implementation and ability to adapt to client needs. The building society is currently in the final UAT stage of the project and full integration with ADP will be ‘live’ shortly.

Darren Ditchburn, chief customer officer at Darlington Building Society, said: “We pride ourselves on the level of service and personal approach we have on each case and, with the help of the LendingMetrics team, believe we have developed a solution that will allow us to focus on the details of the case and arrive at a decision quickly and in a way that maintains our quality of service.”

Neil Williams, chief technology officer of LendingMetrics, added: “Working with Darlington has provided us with a great opportunity to really see how ADP can be effectively used for assisted – as well as automated – decisioning. We’re looking forward to seeing the integration go live and Darlington fully utilising the benefits of our multi-award-winning solutions.”