The Intermediary – July 2025 - Flipbook - Page 74
T E C H N O L O GY
Opinion
n today’s highly competitive
mortgage and savings
markets, retaining existing
customers has never been
more important. For
lenders, it is fundamental to
controlling costs, protecting balance
sheet strength, and ensuring the longterm sustainability of the business.
While all lenders know this in
theory, finding efficient ways to
ensure they achieve it in practice can
be challenging. For building societies
and mid-tier lenders, the issue is
particularly pressing – the high street
banks can lend at such scale, they can
price their cleanest criteria at rates
below base.
This leaves lenders without this
scale to fall back on with a strategic
choice: many choose to offer
customers value in the form of service
and flexibility on criteria. For building
societies especially, there has been a
long tradition of offering personal
service both face-to-face and over the
telephone. It allows customers to ask
questions, bypassing the irritation
oen experienced by borrowers trying
to deal with larger organisations
that rely on call centres and triaging
customer service.
Now, however, we are at a moment
in time where there are decisions
to be made about how this service
needs to evolve. Almost everyone in
the mortgage and savings industries
is fully on board with the idea that
digitalising processes is a case of
‘when’, not ‘if’.
We recently commissioned some
independent research into how
the mutual sector is approaching
these challenges today, and plan
to publish our full findings later
this summer. For now, I can share
I
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The Intermediary | July 2025
some of the consistently held views
gathered so far.
Despite the obvious advantages, it
seems there is persisting cautiousness
to overhaul origination and servicing
platforms in parts of the market.
Accepting the enormous benefits
it can offer, the scale of the task of
modernising bank and building
society platforms and systems is
impossible to overplay. Legacy
programming dates back over four
decades for some lenders. Customer
files are collated in numerous ways,
in numerous systems. The cost, the
risk and the time it takes to upgrade
or replace old processes remains
daunting for some.
Nevertheless, through carrying
out this research we found a tangible
appetite for change, especially among
tier two mortgage lenders. The large
high street banks have been able to
invest in new technology earlier,
though still must contend with a
plethora of legacy systems. Now, the
market is seeing a wave of mid-level
building societies embrace cloud-based
offerings – either upgrading across
the board or taking advantage of some
of the more flexible plug-and-play
options on offer.
For example, we recently
announced that the Cambridge
Building Society is our first customer
to adopt and go live with its new
mobile-first onboarding app for
savers, a solution we launched in
February this year.
The fully customisable mobile app
is designed to tackle the common
pain points of savings onboarding,
HAMZA BEHZAD
is business development
director at Finova
reducing manual handoffs and
customer dropouts, enabling savers
to open accounts in just a few
minutes. By combining onboarding
and in-life account management
within one platform, the Cambridge
is empowering its customers with
a seamless, end-to-end digital
experience.
On the mortgage side, self-service
product switching solutions that cater
to both customers and brokers acting
on their behalf are an increasingly
popular approach to upgrading
systems for business growth while
minimising operational risk.
We’re working with several lenders
to integrate our newly improved
retention portal, fully powered by our
SaaS banking originations platform,
to streamline the mortgage switch
journey for existing customers who
are approaching the end of their
fixed-term deal.
While upgrading back-end systems
is essential, customer-facing tools like
