Technology Service Awards 2007

The 2007 Mortgage Strategy Technology Service Awards are the most extensive technology- related awards in the mortgage industry. The awards are based on the findings of the 2007 Lender intermediary Technology Benchmark Study – an annual piece of research undertaken by Frank Eve Consulting Limited. This year 32 lenders were involved in the research and it was extended to include questions on packager and intermediary integration.

The awards process started in June this year when an intermediary technology forum, involving a cross-section of prominent intermediaries, verified the awards methodology and study questions. This provided valuable feedback on broker and packager needs and gave the lender participants useful information for the development of future technology.

The categories used to assess detailed functionality in respect of lenders’ intermediary distribution technology were:

The study then defined basic threshold requirements, current best practice and emerging best practice in each of the above categories. Points were awarded for functionality considered by the intermediary forum as best practice and the Gold award has been awarded to those lenders that achieved the highest number of points. The efficient use of technology to process intermediary business gives firms a real advantage. The Technology Service Awards reflect the findings of this year’s study and provide an effective way of comparing one firm’s progress against others in the market. In such a competitive industry, lower costs and more efficient service standards do make a difference. The efficient processing of information electronically is faster and greener, and can help firms focus on maintaining good standards of record-keeping, which the Financial Services Authority has earmarked as an area of improvement for lender and intermediary firms.

This year the larger prime lenders have focused their integration activity on linking their systems to Trigold and Mortgage Brain and their transaction platform Mortgage Trading Exchange. These systems provide smaller brokers with product sourcing and transaction functionality. But larger brokers and packagers want direct integration with lender systems to provide some competitive advantage when dealing with their clients. This activity has been driven by specialist lenders and their packager partners and has been acknowledged this year with two new award categories for Sourcing Systems and Packager Technology.

All lenders need to reduce cost and bring efficiency to the application process. The recent liquidity crisis and capital market problems that came to light over the summer have made this even more important. So it’s likely that lenders will direct IT budgets towards further integration with major intermediary partners’ point-of-sale systems in 2008, to drive further process cost reductions. With cost considerations limiting the number of integrations that lenders are prepared to undertake, we could see the emergence of new partnerships between groups of lenders and their distributors, based on shared values and technology.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the award winners this year. 2008 will be another challenging year for the mortgage industry and I will be looking forward to monitoring how lenders and their distribution partners develop e-commerce systems and connectivity over the next 12 months.