First, tell us about your career background and your role at Ohpen?
For the last 30 years I have focused on digital transformation. Firstly, at NatWest/RBS in the early days of ‘e-commerce’, and then driving digital adoption through the simpler financial products at IE Digital and moving into the larger challenge of mortgages at Sopra Banking Software.
I’ve since been at Ohpen for the past three years as UK Managing Director, setting up our team in the UK and driving Ohpen’s mission to make financial services fit for the future. We’re a Software as a Service (SaaS) core banking platform supporting financial institutions that want to serve customers better. Ohpen was the first fintech platform to bring a bank to the cloud. In the UK, we have focused on transforming and digitalising the mortgage technology market which has been dominated by large legacy platforms. We have already announced clients in the building society, specialist lender and greenfield/start up spaces and expect to be able to announce more new clients in the coming months.
At Ohpen, my key area of focus is how lenders can harness the simplification and automation that technology can provide with the desire to give the expert (broker/underwriter etc) the tools to do their job most effectively. It is a very different form of digitalisation.
What do you believe are some of the fundamental challenges holding back the mortgage lending market? What is Ohpen’s role in helping solve these problems?
The mortgage lending market is facing multiple challenges from economic volatility, changes in regulation and government policy (with a new government focussing on the housing market) through to increased competition as new players enter the market and pressure on volumes increase.
All these challenges require a different operating model for lenders. It is about creating an agile and responsive organisation that quickly reacts as opportunities present themselves or challenges materialise. Technology has a key part to play here, and it is clear that legacy technology has stifled mortgage lender’s ability to meet their strategies. The industry has been crying out for a less complex and more streamlined end-to -end processes for a long time, to ease and speed up the challenging journeys that we ask customers and brokers to go through.
Our proposition at Ohpen is to provide the best user experience for clients, employees and brokers by taking in data across the full journey (and working with partners who will expose their APIs) and digitalising and validating in real time. We also want to provide lenders with the all the tools required for them to rapidly make changes to products and processes so they can gain competitive advantage. The business case works from both a cost perspective (freeing up underwriters and operational staff to focus on added value activity) and from a revenue perspective, taking advantage of new opportunities.
Ohpen recently launched a campaign all about the stresses of the mortgage application process in the UK. Tell us about some of the findings that surprised you the most?
Our recent campaign lifted the lid on the emotional and economic impact of UK banks’ mortgage processes on consumers, to uncover how in need of modernisation these processes are. The findings revealed that half of people that have applied for a mortgage reveal the feeling they most associate with the mortgage application process is anxiety (46%).
Although all age groups had some level of stress regarding the application process, there is a stark generational divide. Nearly three times as many Gen Zs (28%) found the mortgage application process significantly more stressful than moving house than Baby Boomers (11%).
One of the most surprising findings, was the significant impact the stress of mortgage application processes is having on workplace productivity – the falling rate of which has been called out by Prime Minister Keir Starmer as a priority for the new government. Nearly a quarter (22%) of younger adults surveyed (18–24-year-olds) admit to calling in sick to work due to stress triggered by their mortgage applications.
What do you think the findings mean in terms of improving the UK’s mortgage application process?
These findings are a damning indictment of the inefficient mortgage application processes delivered by lenders’ archaic legacy systems. Hundreds of thousands of Brits apply for a mortgage every year, and so the total impact on mental health, wellbeing and productivity is significant. The generational gap in the impact of mortgage applications makes it clear that lenders’ processes have not modernised and what was cutting edge 40 years ago is no longer fit for purpose.
We need a coordinated effort to make the process more transparent and inclusive from the outset. We can speed up the application process by taking complex legacy technology out of the equation and enable better real-time data sharing between all the stakeholders involved in the home-buying journey.
