(No underwriters were harmed during the making of this blog)

In the last two and a half years, if I had a fiver every time I heard some righteous sod tell me that a secured loan sourcing system cannot replace a good old-fashioned human underwriter, I wouldn’t need to spend my days dragging my butt to the office and around the country in an attempt to promote our own miLoan system.

The thing is these people are missing the point. A sourcing system is not there to replace the human underwriter who is vital to the process being completed correctly. It is there to help human beings facilitate communication with each other in a simple to use platform that works in the same uniform, familiar way each time you use it.

For the naysayers (who have probably stopped listening): You go to the site, you enter information to get quotes, which you can give to your client. That’s all the client wants to know – the figures. You look at each of the different lenders and the products they have on offer. You either make your choice then and there, or you save the quote till later, and you email it to your client. Or you call up your contact at Y3S (details will be on screen) and you discuss the case further. If you don’t need to contact us, you can enter the clients personal info and submit it. A small army of people inside Y3S are mobilized and the rest is done for you. They get SMS updates on their phones and case-tracking on their email. They get instant remortgage comparisons and product suitability letters.

There, that wasn’t so bad was it? No drama, nobody was fired, were they? Nobody was marched from the office and replaced by an I, Robot or Terminator-like machine. No. Of course not. Just like we’ve used Trigold and Mortgage Brain for years, through sourcing systems, brokers have discovered the benefits of not having to pick up the phone to their secured broker every two minutes and wait for an hour till they call back, because they lost the post-it note with the clients number on it, and getting asked different questions depending on who answers the phone… Doh! “For the love of God, my client is sitting here patiently, it’s embarrassing for me, I just want some bloody quotes!”

Over half of all the brokers in Britain have signed up to use our system and scores of others use it daily. Can it really be that bad? It’s generated millions of pounds of loan completions and put almost half of that back into mortgage brokers pockets. Do you still hate it? No you do not. On the contrary in fact. You love to use it.

So, are these old fashioned philistines that do not wish to be a part of this progress still visiting the loo in their gardens and eating bread and dripping for their tea? No, they are certainly not. They are simply industry people who do not have the knowledge or will to build such a system, and find it therefore easier to poo-poo the efforts of others in a doomed bid to make themselves look better. Sadly, as we all know they create the opposite effect for themselves.

In the meantime, brokers that have shed blood, sweat and tears developing their sourcing systems will continue to work late into the night tweaking and fine-tuning their machines in a bid for perfection, harnessing the power of the web to build the secured loans industry and create (rather than destroy) further underwriting jobs, so that the nations mortgage brokers and secured loan customers may be better served for the future.