Blog: From disruption to deployment: helping brokers unlock the next phase of mortgage tech – Mortgage Strategy

The debate about whether technology will disrupt the intermediary market is largely over. The more important question now is how quickly the market can move from interest and experimentation to confident, practical deployment.

Technology has always changed the way brokers work, from mobile and email, to websites, aggregator partnerships and workflow automation. What feels different today is the pace of change, and the fact that newer technologies are increasingly interpretive: they can understand context, create actions and, in many cases, be deployed without significant technical expertise.

To understand how brokers are responding to this next phase of technology adoption, we recently carried out our Broker Technology Survey, which received responses from more than 800 brokers across the intermediary market. That scale gives us a strong evidence base for understanding not only where brokers see opportunity, but also where they need greater confidence, support and practical guidance.

It is in that deployment phase where we are seeing a clear gap across the broker market. In the survey, 67% of brokers said they had low confidence in using AI within their business. Many want to see real-life, proven and safe examples of how new technology can be used in a way that supports the high compliance standards expected in the mortgage sector.

That is an entirely fair position. Brokers need confidence that any technology they adopt supports robust, explainable and compliant customer outcomes, particularly where it informs processes that sit close to advice.

That is why we are focused on a practical support strategy for our intermediary partners. With 98.5% of respondents telling us they want more help with training and tools for emerging technologies, our role is to help turn interest into informed action. That support will include webinars, in-person events and direct engagement through our business development manager teams, who continue to play a vital role in helping brokers understand what technology can mean for their individual businesses.

At a wider network, club and firm level, we are already seeing strong outcomes from technology adopters who are using digital tools to create a better experience for clients. We also need to be conscious of how customers are using AI in their wider lives. For many, AI is quickly becoming normalised, with newer and more advanced models creating greater levels of familiarity and trust. Even if that expectation is not yet fully realised in mortgages, it is important that we understand where customer behaviours are heading and what that could mean for the intermediary journey.

Our Broker Technology Survey also highlights where there are opportunities for stronger partnerships across the technology ecosystem. For example, 34% of brokers still go directly to lender websites to check criteria. That suggests there is an important opportunity, from an industry perspective, to simplify and standardise how criteria is surfaced, distributed and trusted across the market.

One area being supercharged by new technology is customer relationship management. One in five brokers are now using a proprietary system for client management, and many of these options have only emerged in recent months. AI tools are helping to accelerate the development of these systems, including solutions built by brokers themselves to meet the specific needs of their businesses.

That same ingenuity and focus on problem solving is why we have revived this year’s Dragons’ Den. It gives both established and emerging technology providers in the mortgage space the opportunity to identify a real market problem and pitch their solutions. It is a personal highlight for me, because it allows us to work closely with innovative businesses that are helping to support a healthy, competitive and growing intermediary sector.

The industry does not have a lack of technology. Brokers now have access to some excellent tools. The key questions are more practical: where are those tools, how can they support my business, and what does the audit, trust and governance around them look like?

Our focus is to help brokers answer those questions with confidence, so they can deploy technology safely and effectively, benefit from efficiency gains, reach new customers and help define the next generation of the intermediary market.

Frances Cassidy, head of strategic & technology partnerships at Lloyds Banking Group