Nationwide Building Society has launched automatic verification technology to speed up affordability assessments for intermediaries. In this article, we explore the role of digital transformation in financial services – in particular, the mortgage sector – and discuss how other firms can take advantage of new digital mortgage and banking technologies.
Digital transformation in the mortgage sector
There is no doubt that digital technology has transformed the UK mortgage landscape in the past decade. Indeed, in recent years, many lenders have made great strides in improving the speed and efficiency of their processes. As such, in a high volume process-intensive industry like this, the right technology is crucial to streamline these processes, reduce costs and improve the customer experience; all whilst fulfilling strict regulatory requirements.
Operational processes for mortgage approvals can be very complicated:
- an average of 8-10 people involved
- an average closing time between 18-40 days from start to final offer1.
Not only that, but three out of four mortgages in the UK are written by an intermediary, so it’s imperative that lenders embrace digital or risk losing market share to digital disruptors in the market.
Considering the new digital technologies that are available, and the ability to run a ‘near paperless operation’, many UK mortgage lenders are still not operating as efficiently as they have the potential to.
Digital capabilities are transforming the full mortgage life cycle
This, combined with the fact that customer expectations have evolved and competition from non-bank market entrants has expanded, large mortgage banks require a rapid shift in digital capabilities.
The potential for technology to improve how such an industry can operate is a subject that myself, and the EDM Group has significant experience in.
How Nationwide Building Society delivered an automated mortgage solution
In May this year, Nationwide Building Society partnered with EDM Group to create a bespoke assessment portal using EDM’s Automated Document Verification Platform. The automated income verification processing tool will significantly speed up the application process for brokers and their customers.
The Challenge
Nationwide Building Society were looking to reduce the time it takes to assess applications so that brokers can work through cases and provide their customers with their offers faster.
This ‘intelligent processing’ solution provided by EDM Group will be used by NBS as part of the ‘affordability assessment’, by automating a part of the process that was previously manual, to include 100% of all mortgage applications and speeding it up by at least 24 hours.
“We are proud to be Nationwide’s fintech partner of choice on their journey to innovate and transform the mortgage application process. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool is a uniquely responsive tool that can automate very complicated income affordability processing. It has been introduced for all mortgage affordability assessments, with its ‘intelligent capture’ feature providing a digital read on documents with the ability to identify text and values from an image and then transfer the information into a digital format.”
How it works
The tool automatically verifies information on documents, such as payslips, reducing the need for manual intervention. With the ability to assess thousands of payslips every week, this allows cases to be underwritten and offers to be made easier, and faster.
We are really pleased to be part of Nationwide’s incredibly innovative transformation of the mortgage origination journey, making it ever easier and faster for brokers to apply. It was a brilliant opportunity for us to work closely with their digital team to help automate income verification in a really unique way. We are in the process of extending our RiskHub platform right across the Mortgage Origination process, with NBS and other lenders.
Find out how our Mortgage RiskHub solution can work for your organisation
Request a consultation to speak to one of our Mortgage RiskHub experts today for more information.