The lender is currently live with five broker firms piloting its pre-population API link which works through the Smartr365 and Twenty7Tec systems.
This pre-populates the Barclays application system with details from the fact find, reducing the amount of data the broker has to re-key.
“There’s still some re-keying – obviously every fact find, every sourcing is different so the question set isn’t necessarily standard,” Craig Calder director of mortgages at Barclays told Mortgage Solutions.
“It takes all the data that’s within the fact find and sourcing and pre-populates it into the Barclays application system.
“It takes all the bits that it possibly can and then leaves the bits which are more specific to Barclays or might be questions which have not been asked in a fact find,” he added.
API roadmap
Barclays is also working on an API which will enable brokers to track cases that it expects to go live in the second quarter of this year.
A submission API that will be an end-to-end submission without the need to come into the Barclays application system and a soft-decision API which will give a soft footprint decision in principle (DIP) are also in development.
The latter is currently available on the lender’s website but not as an integrated API.
“The soft decision will definitely be next year, but I’m hoping the rest of it will be this year,” Calder said, although he added that like any big program, “timelines are fairly fluid”.
“That’s our roadmap,” Calder continued.
“We’ve talked to brokers and platform providers about what does a sensible roadmap look like.”
Lot of learning
Barclays is only working with Smartr365 and Twenty7Tec at present as these were the two that were “most advanced at the time” it was looking to begin work.
However, Calder acknowledges that in time every lender will have to work with all of the providers, but doing so at one time will slow the process down.
“We’ve done a lot of learning with those two providers, our teams internally and broker partners,” he continued.
“Everyone operates slightly differently, everyone asks slightly different questions, everyone asks for things like identification at a different part of the journey.
“So by being able to tweak and course correct at every part of the journey it gets to absolutely meet the needs of the broker submitting the case, us as the lender and ultimately the customer,” he added.
Writing in a contribution for Mortgage Solutions, Calder explained the aims behind APIs and how they will evolve the mortgage broker and customer journey.
