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Lender service levels - Does WFH need to go?

Journalist: Jane Matthews, FTAdviser

ended 13. October 2022

We're hearing mortgage brokers are still frustrated with service levels from lenders, and some are blaming it on work from home policies. If you are a mortgage broker, do you agree? Do you think lenders need to return to a call centre environment? 

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Mike Staton
Director at Staton Mortgages
The frustrating thing is that service levels have been dreadful since the beginning of the Pandemic, thats way back to March 2020. Lenders have had 3 years to get their house in order but have failed to do so. Waiting 28 days for an underwriter to pick up a case is completely unacceptable. Its hard to understand why lenders are happy to provide such a poor service, with increased volumes of applications, increased profit margins, they can easily afford to increase their workforce. Unfortunately its another instance of profit over service. Only this week have we seen Bluestone increase all of their rates to customers that are awaiting a mortgage offer, some of these customers have been in the underwriting que for 3 months, with underwriters coming back and forth asking for additional info, the poor service level has cost these customers fortunes, having applied for a mortgage at 5% and being told after they have paid fees that it is being put up to 8% or 9%. The other knock on effect to these service levels are interest rates, it is not just the bank of england increases that cause lenders to increase their rates. During busy times, it is common practise for lenders to increase rates to slow down the amount of applications coming in. Santander did this over a month ago, exceeding the 6% mark before anybody, this increase was solely to take the pressure off its overworked underwriters.
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Anil Mistry
Director and Mortgage Broker at RNR Mortgage Solutions
Lenders for sure need to return to a full-scale call centre environment, much like pre-covid. Currently, when calling lenders for updates and/or criteria queries, we can spend in excess of one-hour plus waiting for someone to answer. When you are a 'one-man band' brokerage this takes up a lot of time and, potentially, impacts the service you want to give to your clients. It also makes you not want to use that lender in certain cases due to service levels.
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Graham Cox
Director at Bridging Hub
Maybe there's an element of working from home causing problems, but I'm not convinced. After all, employers can still see an employee's output. Personally, I think the main issue is the lenders are extremely busy and it's a very challenging environment right now, with constant rate changes, and surging demand for those lenders who havn't withdrawn products. Having said that, they could cut down their support workload substantially if their online platforms were more user-friendly. Some of the worst culprits are the household name lenders. Poorly worded application questions and criteria, unintuitive, confusing and glitchy forms and inadequate communication are my biggest bugbears. Some of the smaller building societies have platforms that put the bigger players to shame.