This week the accolade goes to Lisa Peach-Hill for her response to the post: Proc fees: ‘In return we get nothing but poor service’ – Star Letter 01/06/2018.
She said: “The problem for brokers here is – if you know you have to use a particular lender with poor service standards and cannot justify not using them to your client or compliance department – would it be fair to charge the client a higher fee to cover the extra administration costs involved?
“It is a genuine additional expense to a business using badly performing lenders. I don’t see why the broker firms should have to absorb these costs, but refusing to use a particular lender on the basis of performance alone sometimes means missing out on the best deal for the client or losing the business.
“It’s a bit of a grey area in my opinion and such a shame that we don’t have any way to evidence such poor performance to clients at the point of research. I’ve often wondered why mortgage sourcing systems don’t provide crucial information like timescales a lender is currently working on from say full packaged submission to valuation, valuation to offer.
“It would only be a small adjustment to their systems to provide meaningful information. It would certainly help us steer cases in the right direction and put things in perspective for clients at point of sale.”
