Should the mortgage industry make use of AI tools such as ChatGPT to speed up processes?

I went straight to the source and asked an AI. It said: "AI tools like ChatGPT can streamline mortgage applications, providing faster, personalized service while reducing fraud risk and errors."

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I've lost count of the number of hours I've spent waiting on a bank's phone line or live chat to discuss the nuances of their lending criteria. AI could be an enormous time-saver in that regard, as well as helping loan provider's make faster lending decisions.

On the other hand, AI and machine learning obviously has huge ramifications for jobs. Will it replace the role of the mortgage broker completely? I suspect it will over the coming decade, as it will with many other roles.

The use of AI tools and electronic processing applications should be embraced within the Finance Industry, for too long, several businesses within this Mortgage industry have been rooted in old systems - like paper applications and manually certified ID - both crazy when you can get on a plane and travel the world with computer verified documents - yet you can't obtain a mortgage without numerous manual checks.

It's great to embrace and work with business moving into the digital era with pace, digital mortgages jump ahead some time ago and understanding the first electronic Land register submission all make sense in this digital world.

I applauded ONS for taking a forward-thinking approach and hope the trend is set for others to follow, providing due diligence and responses are quality checked for constant improvement.

AI. Scary stuff; I've seen Terminator and The Matrix, and I know how this ends...but until it turns on us and plunges us into a war of humanity versus the machines, can it be useful for the mortgage and legal world? The answer is yes, to a point. There are a lot of very manual and repetitive processes and checks that occur, but until now have been too varied to apply software to help, you only have to look at the different formats of pay slips and bank statements to start to see these issues. If AI can be applied to do a lot of the heavy lifting on these tasks, freeing up brokers, underwriters and conveyancers to concentrate on the people involved in the process and not just the paperwork, then we are very likely to end up in a great place.

Let's be clear we LOVE technology, as is demonstrated by the automated mortgage underwriting systems we have created to use with our clients. A resource currently backed up by scraping the internet for research isn't appropriate for a legally binding and highly regulated mortgage and property transaction. You'd be open to enforcement action by the FCA, financial regulator, VERY quickly. We just sent a query to ChatGPT of what the best mortgage was for a set of variables and its response was "As of March 2023 the average interest rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage in the UK is around 2.8%". Not only has this response by the AI been skewed by the US market by quoting a 30-year fixed rate - which is rare here but common in the USA, but the average rate quoted is about a year out of date for the UK.