According to Finance UK, there were 50,500 new homeowner re-mortgages completed in October which was 23.2 per cent more than in the same month a year earlier. The £9.2bn of re-mortgaging in the month was 22.7 per cent more year-on-year.[1]

On top of this In the FCA’s Mortgages Market Interim Report 2018, the need for more customer-facing innovation in the mortgage market is being encouraged for traditional lenders to speed up and simplify the mortgage lending process. [2]

On average it can take up to 45 days depending on the lender to have a mortgage approved, this can be prolonged further if the loan requires additional underwriting.[3] Generally, mortgage lenders will underwrite applications manually which is time-consuming and prone to error. The lengthy application cycle is both costly and time intensive, leaving applicants waiting for days on the status of their mortgage according to Puneet Taneja, Head of Operations at Teleperformance Digital Integrated Business Services.

Bhupender Singh at Teleperformance Digital Integrated Business Services continues: “As re-mortgaging has reached its highest level in almost a decade, it is important for traditional lenders to offer more innovative solutions that provide faster and more efficient mortgage applications benefiting both the providers and their customers. Rather than having to wait days to find out whether an applicant is eligible for a mortgage, automating the checks required, assessment, valuation, offer and contract completion process takes away the headache from mortgage brokers so they are able to communicate to customers and give them offers in 30 minutes.”

“Across the assessment, valuation, offer and contract completion process, manual data-entry errors can be reduced using Optical Character Recognition technology (OCR) by attaining customer data from key documents automatically. These bots can extract applicant’s personal details from know your customer (KYC) documents and automatically review the applicant’s credit history which can speed up the mortgage application lifecycle.” 

Bhupender continues: “Digitising the home-buying process by intelligent reporting and dashboards reduces the processing times by 40% from 11 days to 48 hours, as well as cutting costs by 50%. Using the AI and Automation based initiative which uses bot technology to gain business intelligence decreases the stress of mortgage brokers getting applicant’s data to find out if they are eligible, reducing 80% of business critical errors resulting in an enhanced operations and customer experience.”