The aim was to “draw a line in the sand on where the lender broker relationship is today” says CML director general, Michael Coogan. “Having understood that relationship as it exists today we wanted to attempt to understand how MMR would affect the market and what we wanted the future market to look like. For example, are intermediaries business introducers or partners?”
Coogan says the work helped all three trade bodies identify the need for more collaborative working within the industry as well as beyond it to ancillary markets. Understanding the intermediary’s role in this way has been pivotal for lenders and brokers over the past year at least – culminating in the FSA’s third MMR paper on distribution which sought to formalise the role of the intermediary. Regulation is still at proposal stage however, and Alan Cleary, managing director of lender Precise Mortgages, articulates how every lender is already approaching distribution in today’s market.
“Lenders are choosing distribution based on long-term relationships, trust and quality,” he says. “If you’re a good broker and you do things properly you have nothing to worry about. The upside is it improves professionalism for the consumer.” As a direct upshot of this change in mentality, lenders say they are engaging more closely with brokers. Adrian Whittaker, key accounts director at Abbey for Intermediaries, says that process is about more than just differentiating on mortgage rates. “By working closely with
intermediaries to find out how we can improve our offering and to make it as easy as possible for intermediaries to place their business with us, we’ve introduced a number of changes over the past 10 months which have really helped us turn our service around and enabled us to reduce our mortgage offer to just nine days on average,” he says. One such improvement, he says, has been the changes made to AfI’s Mortgage Application Tracking System (MATS) in December, which mean
mortgage introducer FEBRUARY 2011 27
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