As we gear up to spend time at the Building Societies Association Annual Conference this year, there is one conversation I know we are going to be having a lot.
When it comes to technology, the mutual sector is certainly not short on ambition. Everyone understands the need to modernise, speed up service and compete in a market that relies increasingly on data.
But let’s be honest, there is still a fairly big gap between that intent and the actual impact on the ground.
For a long time, the conversation has started and ended with infrastructure. We talk about platforms and the headache of system migration. Given the sector’s focus on resilience and control, that makes total sense.
But we hit a wall when we start treating transformation as just a change of venue, rather than a change in how we actually work.
MORTGAGE ORIGINATION
Nowhere is this more obvious than in mortgage origination. The reality is that many building societies are still running processes that are fundamentally manual. Lifting those existing processes and dropping them into the cloud without rethinking them doesn’t solve the problem. It just relocates the friction.
Think about how borrower data is handled right now. The mortgage journey is fragmented. A single application bounces between sales, credit, underwriting and fraud teams. At the heart of it all is the endless collection of evidence. Payslips, bank statements, P60s and identity documents are gathered, checked, reviewed and then usually requested all over again.
Brokers spend hours packaging this information only for lenders to pull it all apart, extract what they need and inevitably come back asking for more. It creates delays, duplicates effort and drives up operational costs.
BIG CONSTRAINT
In fact, across the UK and Ireland, managing documents in mortgage origination costs the industry around £0.5billion a year. For building societies trying to balance investment across their business, that is a massive constraint.
The issue isn’t just inefficiency. It is that this model belongs to a different era. Brokers expect faster decisions. Customers want clarity. Regulators demand fairness and accuracy. You simply cannot meet those expectations by throwing more people at manual processes.
The opportunity here is not to build a slightly better portal for uploading PDFs. It is to change how we interact with the data inside those documents. We need to move away from static file handling to dynamic extraction. When a broker submits information, the system shouldn’t just store it, it should understand it.
DATA VALIDATION
A modern approach means automatically extracting data, matching it to the applicant and validating it without human intervention. When you cross-reference that data against other sources, you start to see the full picture.
Income becomes contextual, not just a number. You can assess variable earnings for consistency and automatically check tax contributions.
Discrepancies get flagged early, rather than causing a headache weeks down the line. By integrating digital data sources, you can validate company info or analyse bank statements across multiple accounts simultaneously, filtering out the noise.
Instead of endless manual handoffs, origination becomes a connected, data-driven workflow. It reduces human error, improves auditability and creates a seamless flow from submission to decision.
Building societies have the ambition. Now we need to shift how we apply it.
