Agile updates instead of system overhauls allow brokers to work undisrupted – Atkinson

Gone are the days when technology providers would undergo massive software developments that took months or even years to build, then deployed in one big go.

Working on the technology side of the market, we are fully aware that not every enhancement or development will be exciting, and they definitely do not feel ground-breaking when they happen.

That is because they are not supposed to be.

These days, fintechs adopt the method of iterative development, which is simply an agile, piecemeal way of improving platforms and functions over a more stretched-out period of time.

Anyone with a smartphone or laptop will be familiar with these incremental software updates; every so often, you will get a notification about a system update that needs to be downloaded and spend a few minutes downloading the latest upgrade, yet most of the time, there will be no noticeable change to the way your device works.

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If anything, it might be seen in the slight change in the position of a button, a small alteration to the graphics or a minor modification to some functions.

Learning all the time

Bringing it back to mortgage technology, functions will not change so much that an adviser will need a training programme to figure out how it works.

Instead, the updates are intuitive.

Every time a feature or function is added, tech firms are able to test and learn how brokers are adapting to the changes.

There are tools that work in the background to track activity and see where brokers might get stuck on a page or are not seeing a particular feature, such as a submissions or information button.

When it has been identified that something is not working as it should or this has been flagged through feedback loops, it is then updated again.

This enables further changes to be made, which can be relatively small, such as altering the line of a box or the colour of a button to make it more user-friendly.

This is considered behaviour-led development; something Mortgage Brain is moving towards, to ensure major changes that require hours of training or a huge manual are not needed.

It then becomes easier to drop in a change every few weeks and improve particular elements of a system.

How this helps the broker

So what does this all mean to you, the broker using these platforms?

Firstly, significant technological changes are expensive, and companies need to source funding for the training programme, the roll-out, migration, and the salaries of the developers who make these updates possible.

If changes are introduced slowly and organically, although costs are still involved, funding can be sourced more easily, as firms do not have to ask banks to write huge cheques and, most importantly, less of that cost has to be passed on to the broker user.

These updates may not seem like much each time they happen, but over time, if a broker was to compare how a system looked and operated now to how it performed 12 or 18 months earlier, the difference could be huge.

This is intentional as most people do not like change, especially when this change impacts actions they do every day, multiple times per day.

It would simply be too disruptive to a broker if they logged in to a system that looked one way on a certain day and completely different the next.

For example, Mortgage Brain has reworked its whole sourcing system, but on the face of it, it looks virtually the same. This has been done because we do not want brokers to feel like it is completely unfamiliar.

No firm wants to give brokers a user experience that slows them down when they are trying to do their job. Whether they like how a system works or not, brokers will still know where all the buttons are and how a platform works.

So even though the experience has been made faster in the background, it will often look and feel the same.

As much as a user experience team might want to go in and make everything modern and new in one go, it is better for brokers that updates are made in a gentle way.