The service recovery team has been made available to AFI BDMs over the last three weeks and is getting 250 calls every week, with over 100 telephone and field BDMs using the service to feed in broker comments.
The merger of the Alliance & Leicester and Abbey brands under the Abbey for Intermediaries umbrella announced last week unleashed an avalanche of criticism on Abbey for Intermediaries service in the trade press, which Mortgage Solutions put to Alan Mathewson, managing director of Abbey for Intermediaries.
“All our industry feedback has been about service and there comes a point where you have to be honest and admit there have been problems. So now, it’s our number one priority,” said Mathewson.
AFI has identified 10 service issues, he said, and has also set up a risk committee involving heads of several departments to work through Abbey’s problems.
AFI had 12 mortgage processing sites across the UK, which have been rationalised down to two super sites. Mathewson said with this scale and pace of change you lose experience in personnel and produce service which is “not at the level we expect.”
“We are investing in training and resources and are on a learning curve. This is the first stage – the next stage will be looking at our systems and platform,” he said.
Being in the top three in terms of mortgage pricing is key for the bank, said Mathewson, which has made a strategic decision to reward intermediaries for their loyalty, he said.
“We want to be consistent and we want to be the biggest broker lender in the UK. If you want to be big in mortgages you have to support intermediaries, who are currently distributing 57% of the market,” he said.
