Each week, we also round-up the best comments, emails and letters to the site and pick one reader contribution as our Star Letter. This week’s award goes to:
Lenders call for leeway on execution-only sales
I do not believe for one minute that lenders are frustrated with execution only because “lenders want the option to give borrowers information to make sure the mortgage they pick for themselves is the most suitable option available.”
As a mortgage adviser, providing advice, NOT SERVICE, since 2004, I have seen client after client who has definitely not been shown “most suitable option available” even when the lenders were working on service only, whilst suggesting it was advice by careful words and phrases.
We have to look no further than the recent RBS and NatWest denials and subsequent fines for proof of this. For decades lenders have advertised into people’s homes, as to how easy it is to arrange a mortgage and then provide them with higher rate mortgages than necessary when they are with the lender, whilst hiding behind “service”.
Why were so many people who went into to arrange their own mortgages, put on 5% plus fixed rates when the BoE rate originally fell to 0.5%? Now lenders want to guide clients without it being classed as advice. They have had that for 10 years and abused it so I must say that this must not happen.
Personally I would rather there was no execution-only option at all. A number of networks also believe this and won’t allow advisors to use execution-only. They say look to history and prevent the same problems in the future. We must not ease up on the controls on banks, they want them slackening for a reason and it is nothing to do with helping the clients.
Annoyed Broker
