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"The mortgage underwriting world has lost its marbles"

ended 09. June 2025

Brokers have said they are receiving increasingly bizarre underwriting requests from high street lenders, raising serious questions about the state of decision-making within mortgage operations. In one case this week, a major high street lender questioned a client’s (name Christopher) identity simply because the name on his payslip was shortened by his employer to Chris, despite all official documentation reflecting his full name from birth. In another instance, a broker claims a lender demanded that the British Armed Forces amend a military-issued payslip to include the client’s National Insurance number, something that’s not even legally required. Both examples have left brokers asking: has underwriting become too detached from reality? Newspage asked brokers for their views, below.

7 responses from the Newspage community

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David Stirling
Independent Financial Adviser at Mint Wealth
It sometimes feels like underwriters are completely disconnected from the real world and are locked away in a tower, clipboard in hand, working from a checklist written a decade ago. When a bank statement gets flagged because it says 'Master' in front of a young applicant’s name, you know common sense has left the building. With AI hopefully starting to play a significant role in document assessment, there’s real hope that we might finally move past these absurd requirements and the glacial pace of outdated processes.
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Dariusz Karpowicz
Director at Albion Financial Advice
The mortgage underwriting world has lost its marbles. We're witnessing a spectacular triumph of box-ticking over basic reasoning. When lenders demand the British Army rewrite payslips or question someone's identity because their employer dared to abbreviate "Christopher" to "Chris," we've entered territory where computers think and humans just process. This epidemic of bureaucratic blindness is turning straightforward mortgage applications into Kafkaesque nightmares, with inexperienced processors masquerading as underwriters whilst genuine decision-makers vanish behind automated systems. The result? Delayed completions, frustrated clients, and brokers spending more time explaining why someone's nickname isn't evidence of fraud than actually arranging mortgages—a situation that benefits absolutely nobody except perhaps the lenders' IT departments having existential crises.
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Craig Fish
Director at Lodestone Mortgages
These aren’t isolated incidents, they're part of a worrying trend where underwriters appear to be ticking boxes rather than applying judgment. It's creating delays, undermining borrower confidence, and making brokers’ jobs far harder than necessary.
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Rob Peters
Principal at Simple Fast Mortgage
Underwriting decisions regularly cross from bizzare into absurd. Challenging fixed documents or nicknames isn’t due diligence, it’s a lack of common sense. These aren’t rare outliers either; we often spend hours pushing back on ridiculous requests that delay completions and frustrate clients. Lack of process and training means underwriters can be detached from how real jobs, documents, and reality in general actually works. It’s damaging to broker-lender relationships and undermines client trust. Lenders must be held more accountable for delays and start giving underwriters more training and flexibility to use their judgment.
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Michelle Lawson
Director at Lawson Financial
The problem with underwriting is it has stepped down a level and become processing. It is cheaper for a lender to employ a processor than it is an underwriter and in most cases the staff are less experienced- there is no accident or coincidence there. There is little consistency, many lenders don't have case ownership and many staff are unmonitored. Transactions would definitely move quicker if such petty things were moved on or if phones were picked up rather than moving it on to the bottom of the queue after sending an email. A lot is blamed on systems- that is down to the lender to find a workaround. Some lenders just underwrite well, others just need to shut up shop as they have become no-go zones as it isn't worth the stress or aggrevation for the client or the broker. It is a shame it has got to this and it is the worst I have seen it in over 20yrs.
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Steven Hargreaves
Mortgage and Protection Adviser at The Mortgage Co
We have also seen this, however not across the board with lenders but with isolated lenders. It tends to be lenders under service level pressures. As an example, I had an underwriter requesting confirmation as the employers' name on the payslip differed from the one noted on the application, when checking it, the names were identical, however the employer had a large logo on the payslip which were just 2 letters, shortened from the full company name. Why the underwriter would flag this was incredible, but indicative of a lender under pressure.
This is something that regularly happens when a lender's service levels slip, but the lender continues to reduce rates and source very high.
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Patricia McGirr
Founder at Repossession Rescue Network
Maybe it’s not fraud we should worry about, but formatting. I’ve recently had senior medics challenged over this nonsense in time critical transactions. If your name doesn’t fit neatly into a bank’s software field, you're forced to shorten it, but when you go for finance, the 'discrepancy' flags up that you must be an imposter or a scammer. Never mind the passport, the payslips, or the fact your name hasn’t changed since birth. If HR, Halifax or HSBC abbreviates it, all bets are off. These aren’t identity risks, they’re IT systems having an existential crisis and underwriters who daren't override the check so it's 'computer say's 'no.' When common sense gets kicked out for not ticking the right drop-down box, borrowers suffer, brokers fume and lenders look daft.