The Covid-19 Pandemic has thrown a myriad of problems at everyone involved in our industry and Intermediary Mortgage Lenders have certainly not been immune. What we all hoped would be a short term crisis will now unfortunately continue into 2021. In an industry already suffering from capacity issues, what are the consequences of a second wave and how will lenders free up much needed resource to manage record numbers of purchase applications?

Offering support through challenging times

In order to consider the question from a HSBC UK perspective, it’s worth contextualising some of the challenges we’ve had to face over the last seven months. The biggest challenge for HSBC was getting over 250 intermediary staff effectively working from home, not just in the UK, but in Manila and Hyderabad. Having a carefully crafted business continuity plan already in place meant we had immediate working from home capability within a week of lockdown, which allowed us to manage our broker applications effectively. BDMs and telephony colleagues worked in tandem, to assist our brokers over the phone and underwriters maintained high levels of productivity, despite the challenges working from home brings. We also took some very pragmatic decisions to make working with HSBC UK as easy as we could, for brokers to do business with us. For example, we increased Live Chat functionality to allow case updates, increased AVM LTV acceptance whilst surveyors were on Furlough and no longer insisted on certified copies of original documents.

As a consequence, HSBC UK has been able to keep a tight control over our service levels.  In addition, HSBC UK maintained a full range of products at higher LTVs for as long as we could, in order to help as many customers as possible. We were also able to progress many of those cases through to offer, even in full lockdown, as a result of targeted automation e.g. AVMs and desktop valuations right up to 90% LTV.

Intermediary mortgage volumes are at a record level, over 60% higher than 2019 so far. We’ve helped over 12,000 FTBs at 90% LTV, taken over 240,000 calls into our call centre and swapped over 35,000 Live Chat conversations.

Looking ahead

So with colleagues continuing to work from home and the role of an underwriter becoming ever more complex and time consuming, what’s our plan for the rest of this year and into 2021? HSBC UK will continue to offer more capacity than 2019 by bringing forward recruitment plans and continuing to review its processing capability, by simplifying and automating certain tasks. One area that has become more time consuming is self-employed applications, as lenders try to establish income with up to date revenue evidenced through bank statements as opposed to relying solely on outdated tax returns and accounts to assess affordability. So at HSBC UK we’re investing in new technology to reduce the information we require and speed up processing time such as Open Banking technology to capture bank statements. We also continue to invest in our broker platform, to make credit and underwriting improvements to aid efficiency, as well as increasing broker functionality to improve the journey and assist with processing.

Supporting the mortgage market and specifically Intermediary Mortgages remains a top priority for HSBC UK. We have an appetite to grow our stock position and mortgage completions, neither of which have been dented by the Pandemic. We’ve already demonstrated a significant increase in our capacity and we will continue to invest in our people, recruitment and processing improvements to further increase this capacity.