Let’s be honest. If you work in the UK mortgage market right now, you know we’re all running pretty fast just to stand still.
Between managing the fallout from the cost-of-living crisis, dealing with the FCA’s ever-watchful eye and handling the sheer volume of product transfers as borrowers roll off those sweet, low-rate deals from a few years ago, it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster.
We’ve just wrapped up our first-ever Fignum Mortgage Tech Pulse report, chatting with senior execs at over 40 lenders. And what we found won’t surprise you: everyone knows things need to change but getting it done is another story entirely.
For years, the sector has been playing a game of technological whack-a-mole. We’ve bolted on shiny new front-end tools to speed up Decisions in Principle (DiPs) or added a bit of automation to underwriting.
SILOED APPROACH
That helps capacity but it’s fundamentally a siloed approach. We’re optimising bits of the journey in isolation rather than looking at the mortgage lifecycle as a single, connected flow.
Here’s the rub: we’ve become quite good at the front end. Lenders across the board – from the nimble specialist players to the big high street banks – are generally happy with how their origination tech performs. But the moment a case hits post-completion servicing the cracks start to show.
We’re seeing a lot of lenders relying on clunky workarounds to manage product transfers or post-completion changes.
It’s labour-intensive, it drives up the cost-to-serve and, frankly, it makes evidencing good outcomes for Consumer Duty a real headache.
When you’re dealing with legacy systems that were never designed for real-time, continuous risk surveillance, you’re constantly fighting an uphill battle.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
And let’s talk about the elephant in the room: AI. Everyone is talking about it but very few are actually letting it loose on core decisioning.
“Fast follower” was the phrase we heard most often during our interviews. We’re happy to use automation for fraud checks or document verification, but when it comes to the heavy lifting of credit decisions, we’re still taking very tentative baby steps.
So, what’s holding us back? It’s not just the tech itself. Often, it’s the commercial reality of long-term outsourcing agreements that limit flexibility just when we need it most.
But the tide is turning. The lenders we spoke to are increasingly realising that the cost of doing nothing is now far riskier than the disruption of a major tech overhaul.
The focus has shifted from just building capacity to building true agility. We need systems that let us respond quickly to whatever the market or the regulator throws at us next.
BIG TAKEAWAY
If there’s one big takeaway for brokers and lenders from the Pulse report, it’s this: execution is everything.
Having a great strategy is fine but delivering it without breaking the core business is the real challenge.
The firms that will win out in 2026 and beyond aren’t necessarily the biggest ones. They’re the ones with the architectural flexibility to adapt, integrate horizontally, and finally move beyond the “one and done” approach to tech investment.
It’s time to stop tinkering at the edges. The market is moving too fast for anything less than a proper, joined-up approach.
