Following a successful six-week pilot with 10-15 of the lender’s Sapphire Partners, the tech accesses a raft of automation options, including Open Banking for some applicants.
The Bluesky loan origination platform, developed by sister-company Fignum, puts the soft footprint credit decision at the front of the process, offering a time saving of up to 10 minutes.
Applications will still be reviewed by the manual underwriting team however, brokers will also be able to accurately gather household expenditure using Bluestone’s Open Banking integration, offering accuracy and a time saving.
Speaking to Mortgage Solutions, Reece Beddall, sales and marketing director, Bluestone Mortgages, said previous trials over five years ago led to disappointing levels of customer uptake, but now, people accept automation much more readily.
“The end-customer is much more receptive to automated valuations and we want to get our customers ever more used to technology. Our average app to offer has dropped to eight days and not all of these went down the Open Banking journey. Our first case that did took just four days from app to offer,” he said.
The system relies on Office for National Statistics (ONS) data when not using Open Banking and offers a raft of other lending automations including land registry data cross-checks and a register of solicitors.
The self-employed
In phase one of its evolution, the technology is working fully for PAYE candidates, whereas self-employed cases may only use elements of the new technology, but still benefit from time savings, said Beddall.
Doug Hall, director at Mortgage Packager, 3MC, said: “The application to completion journey for a specialist case has traditionally been a lengthy and burdensome task. Bluestone’s new platform has completely revolutionised this process, speeding up the application journey and ultimately resulting in better customer outcomes. Through the platform we have been able to provide an application to completion (on a self-employed cases) in just 21 working days, an outcome we never thought previously possible.”
Beddall said: “This launch marks an important milestone in our automation journey as we strive to deliver a seamless customer experience. This technology enables us to work smarter and faster, allowing us to dedicate more time to our holistic manual underwriting approach. We hope that by launching this platform we can encourage a greater uptake of Open Banking, to not only speed up the application journey for complex cases, but provide better outcomes for the end customer.”
Bluestone Mortgages is owned by a mix of private and institutional shareholders including Australia’s Macquarie Bank, interests associated with Bluestone’s founder and chairman, Alistair Jeffery, and the management team and staff.
Bluestone’s other businesses include Fignum, its fintech start-up, Bluestone Credit Management, and Bluestone Motor Finance in Ireland.
