You sent the same email on Monday that everyone else sent.

Moneyfacts had just put the average five-year fix at 6%, the first time in three years. You’ve seen the subject lines. “Rates are rising: secure your deal now.” “What the latest rate rises mean for you.” A chart. A paragraph about swap rates. A big button that says Book a Call.

Your client got four of those this week. One from you. One from their lender. One from the comparison site they used in 2021. And one from a broker they’ve never heard of who bought their details off a lead generator.

Could they tell which one was yours?

We’ve all been taught the same thing about a rate spike. Communicate. Get in front of clients. Show them you’re on it. So we send the update, feel like we’ve done something useful, and get back to the pipeline.

Sub-5% deals went from 1,494 to nine since the start of September. Every client already knows rates have jumped.

Here’s the problem. The market update is the email that sends your clients to their lender’s app.

It tells them what the news already told them, with your logo on it. It reads exactly like the lender’s version, which went out to a much bigger list. And it’s written for a list, not a person.

Then watch what the client does with four identical emails. The easy thing. They log into their lender’s app, see a product transfer that looks no worse than anything in your chart, and click. Not because it’s the right answer. Because nobody gave them a reason to think there was a better question.

That’s how a rate spike, which should be the best month of the year to be a broker, turns into a month of quietly handing clients back to their lender.

There’s a compliance angle too, and it isn’t small. A frightened client, being told to act now, by a firm that gets paid when they act. That’s not a file anyone wants to read back under Consumer Duty.

What the client actually wants to know is simple. What does this mean for me?

Not for “borrowers”. For them. In pounds.

Take a client who fixed at 1.89% in spring 2022. £220,000 left, twenty-two years to go. They’re paying about £1,019 a month. At today’s average five-year rate, that’s somewhere near £1,500.

Nearly £500 a month. That’s the number keeping them up at night. Not swap rates.

So send them that.

“Your fix ends in March. You’re paying £1,019 now. On today’s rates it’d be around £1,500. Here’s what we’re already doing about it, and here’s the one decision we’ll need from you before Christmas.”

That’s the whole message. Same advice as the market update, probably. Completely different message.

A lender can send the number. It can’t tell your client whether it’s the best one on the market.

And notice what’s not in it. No forecast. Nobody knows what the Budget does on 28 October or what Bank Rate does after it, and the broker pretending to know is the one who’ll look daft in December. Clients don’t need a prediction. They need a number and a plan.

You’ve already got everything you need to write it. Fix end date, balance, rate, term. It’s sat in your CRM.

Which is where this gets uncomfortable.

Could you pull every client coming off a fix before next summer, with their current payment, in under an hour? Most firms can’t. The data’s there, but half of it was never updated after completion, it’s in four different formats, and the only person who understands the reporting is on holiday in Lanzarote.

That’s the real story of this week. A lot of firms found out they can’t tell their own clients what the rise means for them, so they sent the news instead.

The market update is popular for a reason. It’s easy. One email, everyone, done by ten. Personal messages mean fifty different numbers and fifty different conversations.

That’s the point. Anyone can forward the news.

So this week, pull the list. Even if it takes you all of Thursday. Work out the new payment for every client coming off a fix before next summer. Then send 50 short, boring, personal messages instead of one clever one.

Your clients already know rates went up. Nobody wants your market update.

They want their number.

Paul Flavin is a business coach specialising in mortgage firm owners and the author of Build Scale Sell