A telephone survey conducted by Clever Lending of 200 brokers found that 71% are unprepared for the MCD deadline on 21 March 2016, with a further 55% unaware of the regulation altogether.
Clever Lending said this indicated much more work needed to be done to prepare brokers for the changes and customers are kept informed.
Sonny Gosai, sales and operations manager at Clever Lending, said: “We have to remember the end user in this scenario, the customer, and provide assistance for brokers to make them fully aware of the new requirements as they apply for loans early in 2016. Handling pipeline cases will be key in this and very clear messages will need to be produced across the industry.”
Dominik Lipnicki, director at Your Mortgage Decisions, said it was ‘shocking’ that brokers had not learnt lessons from the mistakes made in the run up to the Mortgage Market Review (MMR).
“The results are pretty shocking because we’re only a few months away and surely everyone will want to carry on doing business. I can imagine a lot of one man bands and appointed representatives are leaving that responsibility with their network, but for us, being a directly authorised firm it’s our responsibility and we owe it not only to our brokers but to our clients to ensure we’re not leaving preparations until the last minute,” he added.
“There’s very little excuse to have a different attitude because we’ve known about this for a long time so it’s nothing new. When MMR hit us, many people criticised brokers and lenders even more so for how unprepared they were, so we certainly wouldn’t want to be exposed to that and I’d be surprised if anyone else does.”
Tom Cleary, financial services manager at Start Financial Services, said there had been very little in the way of specifics about the regulation published so far.
“As far as I know there’s not going to be a huge impact. Leading off the back of the MMR I think it’s going to be a reasonably soft landing and it’s technical changes that will occur more than anything else. I don’t have any concerns but I think the lack of education has been a little surprising.”
