The Intermediary – May 2025 - Flipbook - Page 34
I N T E RV I E W
“You think, ‘I’ll take it into work on Monday’
– then you forget. Tuesday, you’re working
from home again. Before you know it, a week
has elapsed just because you’re trying to find
a witness.”
By moving that step online, and allowing
witnesses to sign digitally via email, Interbridge
removed a seemingly small hurdle that too
often caused major delays. It is this kind of
practical innovation that, according to Jones,
“makes a huge difference.”
Adopting technology
If Interbridge set out to make the second
charge journey less laborious, it has done so
not by reinventing the wheel, but by quietly,
and effectively, tightening the individual bolts
that make up the process. As Jones says: “None
of this was groundbreaking, but it’s about
incremental improvements.”
From increased automation and e-signatures
to smarter modelling and automated
valuations, Interbridge has taken small steps
toward one big goal: making the second charge
process faster and more tech-based.
“We’ve really been looking at 1,000 ways to
improve the process,” he explains. “You get rid
of each of those little things and then you make
quite a substantial change. That’s how we then
get to the reductions in the times.”
Much of the magic lies behind the scenes,
in back-end systems designed to discreetly
support the mortgage journey.
Jones explains: “It’s about increasing the
ways in which our systems interact with broker
systems to reduce manual entry and delays and
errors in that area.
“Tech is really important. Brokers want quick
responses, and they get a quick response most
easily when it is a system talking to a system.”
This integration has become vital in a
sector where intermediaries are increasingly
tech-savvy, Jones adds: “Many second charge
intermediaries are quite large and quite
sophisticated.
“Rather than doing the old-fashioned
thing of manually finding out whether their
customer will be accepted by different lenders,
their systems all talk automatically through
[application programming interfaces (APIs)]
and inquire directly.”
Jones continues: “A broker will gather
information and submit it to us simply by
pressing a button on their own system. We’ll
go away and do an automated valuation, we’ll
do a credit search, we’ll do fraud checks – we
assess all of that and bring it together to give
an individual price for each customer.”
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The Intermediary | May 2025
Striking the balance
However, while technology may be at the heart
of Interbridge’s streamlined second charge
journey, it has never been a case of automation
at the expense of human service. In fact,
maintaining a personal touch has been just as
important as building smart systems. Jones is
clear that the two must go hand in hand.
He says: “What we’ve been really careful to
do is to make sure that we’re not the kind of
business where we do our automated systems
and you can’t get hold of a human, where
you try and speak to someone and you get an
[artificial intelligence (AI)] chatbot that thinks
you’re asking about the price of butter.”
It is a scenario all too familiar to anyone who
has found themselves stuck in an endless loop
of automated prompts.
Interbridge, in contrast, has made human
responsiveness a pillar of its proposition.
“We always answer the phone, and we
always answer the phone in a few seconds,”
Jones says. “We look at our phone statistics
very carefully. You just don’t have any
meaningful queues for either customers or
brokers when they want to get hold of us.”
That accessibility becomes particularly
important when cases fall outside the standard
mould, which, in the case of second charge
lending, is all too often.
Jones explains: “We know that not all cases
are identical. Sometimes brokers will be
looking at cases where maybe the income is a
little bit complex, or they can’t quite see how
different types of income might fit within our
packaging guides.
“There’s always someone who will answer
the phone straight away and give guidance.
“It’s all about that interaction of a rapid
human response with a really thought-through
way of getting rid of the pain points in the
automated journey.”
While AI is a hot topic across industries
around the world, Jones believes that when it
comes to mortgages, balance is key.
“In the mortgage market people actually
want to deal with humans,” he says.
“So, what we want to do is use AI solutions
in places where brokers and customers don’t,
need to interact with it, focusing on back-end
changes rather than front-end changes.”
Market trends
While the human touch remains a key
differentiator, the pace of technological
change, and the need to keep up with it, is
shaping the second charge market just as
profoundly. For Interbridge, that means staying
