Humanisation of digital capabilities is essential, finds FSE Week

The panel, which was chaired by Shard Financial Media’s chief executive, Luke Broadhurst, featured Jerry Mulle, the UK managing director of Ohpen; Derek Garriock, design and innovation director from Experience; and Steve Cox, chief commercial officer at Fleet Mortgages.

The session commenced with an audience poll asking what they would change about lender platforms, to which they voted real time communication.

The panellists then explored what they thought the biggest challenges facing the broker-lender value chain were. Mulle explained that from a technology provider perspective, moving platforms forward - that were built 20 years ago - is a real challenge. He said: “Systems don’t talk to each other in a consistent way and brokers need to use many lender systems and lenders are trying to work with many sourcing systems. It becomes an absolute mess.”

Cox contributed from the perspective of a specialist lender. He said that one of the main challenges is that specialist lending often requires human interaction. “It’s needed to talk about cases and complex circumstances, or it can be some kind of business that brokers are not familiar with. So how do we automate and integrate front to back solutions for specialist lending? I think that’s really difficult to do.”

The expert panel went on to discuss digitisation and how that can help the industry. Garriock explained that if you go back 20 years in the mortgage industry, there hasn’t been a fundamental step change in the technology being used. He said: “There’s a higher customer expectation of the things you should be able to do digitally, and the capability exists.”

Moving forward, Mulle said that the humanisation of digital capabilities is essential: “It’s about designing digital that will build the human in when the human wants to be in there. We’re looking at a broader play of what we mean by digital transformation.

“I don’t think we’re going to follow the same path in the mortgage industry that other products have taken, just because of the complexity and the need for advice. Humanisation is going to be absolutely key as we move forward.”

This session and the entire of sessions that took place during FSE Week are now available to view on-demand.