More technology, better service: the year ahead for Buy-to-Let lending operations
Written by Luke Stevenson
See our Buy-to-Let processing times, rates and Special Editions
by Lauren Eaton, Head of Lending Operations
The first quarter of 2021 has been an incredibly busy one for the lending operations team at LendInvest.
At the start of the year we were dealing with an influx of new business from brokers and clients worried about a March 2021 deadline for the Stamp Duty Holiday, as well as the continued pent-up demand of clients who saw new opportunities to expand their portfolios in a post-lockdown environment.
This put strain on our lending operations team, which while dealing with record demand was embedding and embracing new technologies as part of a strategy to reduce service levels back to a pre-pandemic level and be scalable for further increased demand in the future.
What we saw at the start of the year was the decisions we made at the end of 2020 continue to pay off.
Upskilling and better allocating our resources was a strategy we continued to use to make sure the right cases were going in the right place.
In-depth: The technology improving Buy-to-Let speed to offer
Blend between people and technology
The right blend between our in-house experts and new, integrated technology has been what has helped us deliver on the demand while reducing service levels to ensure we’re consistently delivering faster, simpler finance for our broker customers.
We speak at length about being a Fintech company and a technology-enabled lender and what that means for our clients, and we’re already seeing that pay off from integrated equifax searches, digital ID verification and Open Banking.
The technology team at LendInvest has been phenomenal over the past year to deliver numerous integrations that assist our packaging processes, and we’re looking to build on those with further integrating with our new Open Banking provider, Credit Kudos, to further improve underwriting and an upcoming integration with Land Registry for faster searches.
We’ll also shortly be introducing credit-backed DIPs for brokers, as well as a new, slicker solution for uploading portfolios.
Case studies: HMOs up to 75% on five-year fixed deals
Keeping the momentum
After a year of focus on delivering improvements that support our internal packaging process – which has allowed us to get offers to brokers much quicker – the team is keeping momentum by targeting similar improvements to the broker journey and to our post-offer process.
We’ve seen the impact a year of attention can have on one stage of the process and we look forward to what that can mean for the rest of the lending operations journey, and ultimately for brokers and their clients.
Fundamentally however, the challenges of the past year have thrown into sharp relief how fragile good service can be if you don’t have the right systems in place to deliver it.
That’s why we’re encouraged that, with the aid of the changes we’ve made in the past year, we’re seeing an increased number of cases being packaged and offered in faster times, even when the demand hasn’t slowed down.
By delivering technology and automation we can manage increased business levels and continue to hit our key service levels.
See our Buy-to-Let processing times, rates and Special Editions