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Best and worst service levels

ended 22. February 2023

OK, so we're keen to know which lender, in your eyes, currently offers the best service levels — and which the worst. So the two Qs below are pretty simple:

  • Which lender is offering the best service level in your eyes right now (and explain why)?
  • Which lender has the worst service levels at the moment (and what could they do to improve them)?

Over to you. We'll be issuing this tomorrow morning first thing.

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Rob Peters
Principal at Simple Fast Mortgage
Shawbrook offers the most shocking service levels we have experienced in the mortgage market. Taking a jaw-dropping three months+ to pick up a new case for the first touch, and then many months more in a protracted iterative shambles of underwriting chaos. Littered with errors and incompetencies, I am sure many advisers and clients alike have lost the will to live by the time any mortgage offer comes to fruition. Some might go as far as saying it's good financial planning to bequeath the mortgage offer to a next of kin in your final will & testament, just in case you're no longer around when a decision finally comes through. One thing can be said though, Shawbrook is very consistent in their approach - every client we have placed with them over the last two years has suffered the same horrendous plight.
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Benjamin Blyth
Director at Houz Mortgages
The best service levels, in terms of speed to offer, that I have experienced recently are from Nationwide and HSBC. The latter got me an offer out in 48 hours between Christmas & New Year - very impressive. No turkey or chocolate induced lethargy to be seen!

Nationwide more recently went from application to offer in 48 hours on a couple of occasions. One of which enabled a full end-to-end purchase application to completion in just 5 weeks. Superb.

Platform have the worst service levels I’ve experienced of late. They took 9 weeks dithering over an application that Nationwide were able to go start-to-finish on in just 48 hours. By this time Nationwide had better rates too. Platform have supposedly recovered, according to one BDM, only to release market leading rates this week & presumably get themselves inundated again..
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Steven Morris
Advising Director at Advantage Financial Solutions
As a broker nothing irks me more than an unreliable lender getting credit for a case that automatically went through. I see this on linkedin every now and again, lenders like Barclays and Nationwide being praised for being so 'efficient' when a case is automatically approved by their system. That's not the measure of a lender. The measure is when their staff have to get involved. At which point those two previous names offer a dreadful, inconsistent, obstructive, amnesic 'computer says no' service.
Halifax and Accord are by far the most consistent in approving applications quickly.

Even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day, right?