Let me tell you what changed on our side of the desk recently, because I think it says more about where this industry is going than any headline about AI ever could.
When your fixed rate comes up for renewal, we always put together a table for you showing what your new payments will look like under the different options. It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t, not when you multiply it across a busy week. We sometimes see 50 of these expiries in a single week, though 20 or so is more typical. Not long ago, each one of those tables took us about 10 to 12 minutes to build. Now it takes about two.
Same job. A tenth of the time
This gives us more time to talk about your options with you
I want to be upfront about something. The point of this isn’t ‘look how clever our software is.’ Honestly, that’s the bit I care about least. What I care about most is that when you ring us about your refix, or your pre-approval, or any of the dozen small steps in getting a mortgage sorted, we can get back to you faster, and what we send you is more accurate than it used to be.
That second bit surprised me too. We weren’t as precise in the old manual process as we probably assumed we were. The tools we’re using now are sharper, and we checked that, properly, before we trusted them. Every early result got cross-checked against the numbers we’d have worked out by hand, and it kept matching up. Once we were confident in that, we started leaning on it properly.
We didn’t start with technology, we started with our own process
This is the order we did things in, and I think it counts for a lot. We didn’t start with the technology. We started by looking hard at our own process and asking a simple question about every single step in it: does this need to happen at all? Does it add anything? If the answer was no, we cut it. For everything that survived that question, we then asked how we could get the information faster and more accurately. Only after that did we go looking for a bit of AI to put on top and speed the whole thing up further.
That order counts for a lot, because the temptation with any new tool is to assume it’s the answer to everything and go bolting it onto whatever you’re already doing. We didn’t do that. The process came first. The AI is just the accelerant on a fire we’d already built properly.
It’s also worth saying that what we’re using isn’t a general chatbot dressed up for mortgages. It’s been built specifically for financial and mortgage processing, even if it does sit on top of the same broader models everyone’s talking about. We were slow to adopt any of this, and for good reason. We hadn’t fully understood what it could do, and we had real concerns about security, about where your information was going and who could see it. We didn’t move until we’d worked through those concerns properly.
The part that hasn’t changed, and won’t change
This is the thing I want to be clear about. None of this makes the decision for you.
What the AI does is surface options a little quicker than a manual process would, options that were always there, nothing new or different about the substance of them. But you’ve still got two or three ways to structure a mortgage, or split it, or fix it, and someone still needs to sit with you and talk through which one suits your situation. That conversation is still important and isn’t going anywhere. I don’t see it going anywhere for a good while yet to be honest.
I think people are getting nervous about AI right now, often the ones who’ve never really used it, going on what they’ve read rather than what they’ve experienced. I understand the instinct. But in our world, at least, it’s not replacing the relationship. It’s speeding up the parts that were always just admin, so there’s more time for the part that needs a person: working through your options with you and helping you land on the one that’s right.
So, if you’re due a refix, or wondering what your options look like, the process behind the scenes might be quicker than it used to be. The conversation about what to do with it is still very much with us.