As criteria tighten and case complexity grows, broker firms are rethinking workflows, risk and client care
For Anthony Emmerson, managing director at Trinity Financial, the challenges facing UK mortgage brokers today go far beyond interest rates or affordability calculators. At the core of the issue is complexity – not just in client profiles, but in operations, risk management, and the technology brokers must rely on to stay competitive.
“The mortgage market is changing. We still get a lot of stock standard vanilla cases, but it's the people that are falling outside of that category who probably need a little bit more help,” Emmerson said.
At Trinity, which supports a team of 14 brokers, daily operations revolve around flexibility and open communication. Rather than assigning leads blindly, the firm allows brokers to "opt out" of new business based on the difficulty of their current case load.
“You have to be quite mature about things and allow brokers to turn around and say actually I can't cope with that amount of business and take on more leads,” Emmerson said. “We operate an opt-out system where brokers everyday will be asked as to whether or not they can facilitate any more opportunity.”
To help allocate work efficiently, Trinity also filters leads at the intake stage. “If we know that it's a more vanilla case, we might load more vanilla cases onto people that have taken on some complex stuff in order to keep them submitting steadily but also not overwhelming them with too much in the way of complexity,” he said.
Shared internal knowledge plays a big role, with brokers leaning on group chats and collaboration tools. “We also use our own WhatsApp groups to just say, ‘hey guys, I'm faced with this, who's done one recently’,” Emmerson said. “Invariably somebody within the company has done that relatively recently, knows where the pitfalls are and the trip hazards are and can guide the broker to the right outcome quickly and easily.”
The cost of overextension
“We have seen cases within our own company where we've had people that are a little bit too keen and tend to put their hand up for everything,” Emmerson said. “We have seen burnout in young people, trying to go from zero to hero.”
“It's a case in point for today's society where everybody wants to be in the big numbers right from the get go without the level of experience and knowledge that they need to be able to handle those sorts of numbers,” he said.
Maintaining quality means ensuring each broker works within their “circle of competency.” “You don't want to be giving a really complex case over to a mortgage broker who's only had a year or two's worth of experience,” Emmerson said. “Those brokers need to be comfortable within the firm to put their hands up and say they either need help placing this case or need somebody else to deal with this case.”
Process over heroics
“The consistency and the quality is all derived around process,” Emmerson said. “If you've got the right processes in place and you've got the right compliance journey that your brokers and your clients have to go through in order to get you to the right outcomes, [it] means that you have that more consistent service.”
Regarding CRM’s and systems, “You won't find a single system that does everything built into one system,” he said. “So you have to use a multiple of different systems and build them in as best you can.”
On automation, he said: “We’ve designed these nurturing channels within our CRM which, depending on what kind of channel your client will fall into, there's a different journey for each one of those clients to keep in contact with them.”
Regarding client communication, Emmerson said: “People don't like bots and people want to be able to talk to a human being, but without using AI and bots, you're using up a lot of human time, which is the most expensive part.”
A market built on collaboration – or not
“There are very good front-end systems with lead tracking, updating reporting to introducers and all that other stuff,” Emmerson said. “Then you've got your API link feeding into your network so that they get all the information that they need. And then you've got your aftercare systems, your firms like Dashly and Eligible to keep in contact with clients during the mortgage term.”
“If we got all these systems to work together then we'd be off to the races, all it would take is for them to open up their API’s to allow the various programs to push the information from system to system without the need to rekey any data,” he said.
Still, for larger firms like Trinity, the path forward is clear. “What differentiates you from the rest of the market is going to be the way that you handle your clients and the systems and processes that you put in place to make sure that the client feels cared for and looked after,” Emmerson said. “And that's what's going to make that client come back to you versus somebody else.”
As the market grows more complex, Emmerson’s approach suggests that scale, systems and self-awareness will be the brokers’ best defence.
