The business world is littered with examples of companies dominating their respective sectors after being first to market. However, being the first to simply launch a product or service certainly doesn’t always guarantee success. All too many are unleashed with great fanfare only to be swiftly overtaken by better quality, better funded and better packaged goods. One of the highest profile cases in point that springs to mind are the many search engines such as Lycos and WebCrawler that were subsequently swept aside by the power of Google. And the less said about the Betamax video recorder the better.
Whether first, second or later to market, the common theme behind finding success is relatively simple. Be the best at what you do and give your customers what they want. A general rule of thumb for any business is that you should always be thinking about ways to improve offerings and ways to engage with your customer. As this is exactly what your strongest competitors are doing.
So where is this going exactly? Well, as recently reported by Mortgage Solutions, Barclays has become the first lender to announce our Mortgage Credit Directive (MCD) roll-out date ahead of the deadline of 21 March 2016.
This is not something we have entered into lightly or with the sole intention of staking the first to market flagpole in the ground. The fact is that internally we have worked hard for a long time and are now in a position to begin implementing our phased approach from November. Inevitably there may be some glitches to iron out along the way but we feel that engaging with a variety of intermediary partners sooner rather than later will allow us to ensure we are working with them throughout this transition period. And in doing so this should help ensure that changes will be integrated as seamlessly as possible.
As lenders we have learned a lot in recent times thanks to many regulatory changes. As such I believe that we, as an industry, have more robust systems in place across the board to better interpret, implement, educate and communicate with the intermediary market on the impact of the MCD. At this point I wish I could say more, but in the meantime watch this space for more news on this topic in the coming weeks and months.
