The willingness to “take a view” is the most important attribute of a specialist mortgage lender, according to 99% of brokers.

Research by United Trust Bank (UTB) indicated that most mortgage intermediaries say they could live without time-saving tech as long as the lender was willing to take a view on applications and gave them the confidence that their cases would complete.

Over 100 mortgage intermediaries were interviewed and polled for UTB’s mortgage white paper, Growing opportunities for brokers in the specialist mortgage market, and they were asked to rank the importance of specialist mortgage lender attributes and service features from “not important” to “vital”.

UTB’s research found that compared to knowledgeable staff, flexible criteria, confidence in the case completing and the ability to take a view on more complex and marginal cases, fintech features such as e-signing and remote ID verification were “a nice to have rather than a must have” for a majority of brokers.

Other factors more likely to attract brokers to use certain lenders were access to underwriters, flexible criteria and quick decisions.

UTB’s white paper also revealed that 52% of the brokers who took part in the research believe affordability is a bigger challenge for specialist cases compared to mainstream. This supports brokers’ wishes for more lenders in the specialist sector to be flexible in both criteria and underwriting.

Director of mortgages at UTB, Buster Tolfree, who commissioned the white paper, said: “The key to successful specialist mortgage lending is building the proposition around real customers from the very start.

“Taking a view is something you can build into the early stages of the application process, all the way back to what type of properties you’ll lend on, what incomes you’ll support and what credit blips you’ll overlook. If you have a good auto-underwrite system loaded with more flexible, common-sense criteria, then you don’t need a human underwriter to look at every specialist case.

“Auto-underwriting is getting smarter, and lenders are increasingly employing clever fintech for other processes too such as secure document transfers and messaging, remote ID verification and e-signatures. Although brokers are rightly focused on placing difficult cases, the benefits technology can deliver in terms of speed of application, security and, eventually, the cost of specialist lending should not be overlooked and are well worth pursuing.”

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