In conversation with Mortgage Solutions, Cherrington said technology and artificial intelligence (AI) were moving so fast that even if firms felt they were behind the curve, the available tools made it easier to catch up.
“Even if a firm has an AI strategy, they’ve got to be able to think about it agnostically and be ready to switch tools out. Even firms that think they are ahead of the curve with AI and have an AI strategy, other firms can catch up really quickly. It’s not the same as three or four years ago,” Cherrington said.
She said there was now a move from agentic AI to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which combines the sources of agentic AI with robotics to imitate human intelligence.
She emphasised that this was why firms needed to be agnostic and ready to switch tools, saying: “It was only nine months ago that ChatGPT felt like the best thing since sliced bread, until someone said to me: ‘Are you still using ChatGPT? You should be using Claude’.”
Cherrington said that when she switched AI models, she gathered all the information the previous model had learned to train the new model.
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“The bigger firms in our industries, where they’ve got scale, you’re starting to see people on the directly authorised (DA) side bring in compliance services that are AI-backed. Most people are using it for transcription and day-to-day activities,” she added, saying there were also use cases in the wealth sector where AI had been used to complete fact finds, which are then fed through to suitability reports.
Firms adopting technology at different speeds
Within PMS Mortgage Club, Cherrington said there was a split between larger firms that were comfortable with the latest technology, while smaller ones seemed more apprehensive.
Cherrington said the wealth sector had made more progress with technology and AI, despite the market being more complex than the mortgage sector.
“Where we’re not seeing much interest is from smaller firms, with up to five employees, they don’t really know how to use it or what to do with it,” Cherrington added, saying PMS Mortgage Club runs webinars and helps firms identify use cases where technology could automate manual tasks.
PMS Mortgage Club is also reviewing its CRM strategy and taking an agnostic approach to this, while ensuring it has a data transition process to make switching easier to avoid making the wrong decision on the adviser’s behalf.
“Different firms want to pay different fees. We can all see that system A looks fantastic, it’s all singing, all dancing, but it’ll be £250 per licence, per user, and the broker doesn’t want to use it. You have to have a range of price points, many of our brokers just want a bog-standard CRM system where they don’t have to spend very much and only need one or two licenses, and others will see the value of paying for the £250 platform.
“It’s our job to put different options in front of them and understand how it works,” she said.
Where some advisers are developing their own sourcing systems and CRMs, often using vibe coding, Cherrington said most CRM systems available to mortgage advisers were just okay and getting better, but the industry needed to “pressure tech companies to really advance” because those organisations were more equipped to build the tools.
