Ask the right questions – Mortgage Strategy

A firm I spoke to recently trialled a document-handling tool for six weeks.

The tool read incoming statements, worked out what was missing, chased the client and packaged the case. It got roughly four cases in five all the way through. The fifth needed someone to look at it.

The firm didn’t buy the tool.

“Not reliable enough,” was the verdict.

I’ve heard some version of that episode a dozen times now, and I think it’s the most expensive mistake in the market at the moment. Not a bad purchase, but a positive one refused.

The macro question differs from the buying question

Try the same test on a person.

You hire an administrator and, six weeks in, they’re handling most of what lands on their desk and bringing you just the awkward ones.

Nobody calls that a failed hire. You call it a good start, and you’d be annoyed if someone suggested the person was unreliable because they had escalated a file.

Looking too deeply

Part of the problem is that we file this under technology, and technology invites big questions. Where is it going? What does it mean for the industry?

Will there be advisers in 10 years? Good questions for a conference panel; useless when you’re deciding whether to spend a few hundred pounds a month.

What you’re buying is closer to an outsourced service than to software. You’re handing over a defined piece of work and paying for what comes back. When a firm outsources its book-keeping, nobody asks what book-keeping means for the future of financial services.

They ask what it costs, what quality returns and how much of their week they will get back. That’s the whole test, and it’s the right one here too.

The firms getting real value bought a defined outcome, put it in front of live cases and let the escalations tell them what to fix next

Ask it that way and the decision shrinks to something answerable. Will this give me back hours I’m currently spending on work I never wanted? At what price?

What happens when it gets one wrong?

A tool that returns six hours a week for a few hundred pounds a month is a good deal. And one that returns nothing is a bad deal.

The macro question and the buying question are different questions. Firms keep answering the first and then acting as though they’ve answered the second.

If ‘perfect’ is the wrong test and ‘transformational’ is the wrong question, what’s left is arithmetic, based on two numbers, both of which most brokerages could produce this week.

The first is your baseline. Pick the task your team repeats most and cost it honestly.

Hours per case. Days lost waiting on a client. Enquiries that went quiet and never came back. You can’t judge whether a service is worth buying if you’ve never priced doing it yourself.

The fact that a machine can chase a missing bank statement doesn’t mean it should be deciding anything

The second is the escalation rate for that task and, more importantly, what’s included in the cases that are escalated.

So, 20% coming back to a human isn’t a failure; it’s a filter. The question is whether those are genuinely the cases that needed judgement, or whether you’re being handed an arbitrary fifth of the work with no pattern to it.

One of those is a good junior. The other is a mess. The headline percentage looks identical either way, and you tell them apart only by running live cases.

Adviser value

None of this applies to advice.

Reading a client’s circumstances, structuring a case, knowing which lender will take it and why: that was always the value, and the fact that a machine can chase a missing bank statement doesn’t mean it should be deciding anything.

Automate the admin around the decision. Keep a person able to step into any case at any point, and make sure the audit trail shows who did what. Be relaxed about the 80%. Be immovable about the rest.

Part of the problem is that we file this under technology, and technology invites big questions

The firms getting real value aren’t the ones with the best roadmap or biggest budget.

They’re the ones that bought a defined outcome, put it in front of live cases and let the escalations tell them what to fix next.

The ones still waiting aren’t being careful. They’re paying for perfection in a currency that never shows up on the P&L.

Matthew Elliott is co-founder & chief commercial officer at Nivo

This article featured in the September 2026 edition of Mortgage Strategy.

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