The Bank of England (BoE) has released its latest data on mortgage lending this morning which reveals that new lending commitments are at their highest level since 2008 Q1.

BoE also reports that first time buyers increased their share of the market to 21.4% in Q2 2018 - a rise of 1.8% against the previous quarter. Despite the surge in lending, the mortgage market continues to be challenged by a combination of fierce competition from traditional and non-traditional players.

With the rise in the lending market, there is an ever-growing need for traditional lenders to offer innovative solutions that provide faster and more efficient end-to-end mortgage resolutions.

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. On average the loan procedure can take approximately 45 days and this can be exasperated if the loan requires additional underwriting.

Most of the time the lenders will underwrite applications manually, which risks inaccurate pre-approval. Traditional lenders are seeking out next generation technology solutions to compete with non-traditional players to better manage the entire mortgage lifecycle.

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 extract applicant’s personal details from know your customer (KYC) documents and automatically review the applicant’s credit history which will speed up the mortgage application lifecycle, thus reducing the probability of manual error.

Puneet Taneja, Head of Operation at Intelenet Global Services, comments: “Buying a property is an important chapter in anyone’s life - dragging out the process creates a great deal of stress, preventing customers from getting their dream home as quickly as possible. Rather than having to wait for days to find out whether an applicant is eligible for a mortgage, automating the checks required across the assessment, valuation, offer and contract completion process takes away the headache away from mortgage brokers so they are able to communicate to customers and give them offers in 30 minutes.

Puneet continues: “Using this AI & Automation based initiative which uses bot technology to gain business intelligence alleviates the pain of mortgage brokers getting applicants data to find out if they are eligible. Digitizing the home-buying process by intelligent reporting & dashboards reduce processing times by 40% and costs by 50%.”

(Source: Intelenet Global Services)