In the first video in a series of three, the bank group is targeting a Q3 launch for its app to offer origination system, with offer-to-completion functionality coming later.
After flagging the past successes of the Paragon brand, one of the founding BTL market lenders, Sedgwick said it is also continuing to deepen and broaden its distribution strategy and relationships, drawing mortgage clubs and networks into the fold.
Paragon has been simplifying its product proposition “to make it easier to deal with us,” said Sedgwick, and has changed its credit policy; for example, extending offers to 35-year terms.
“It’s all about small steps to improve the offering and, ultimately, make brokers’ experiences with us far more enjoyable,” she said.
The technology journey
Jonathan Workman, transformation director at Paragon Banking Group, said: “We’re starting off with an application-to-offer journey, so that segment will be launched with the pilot in quarter three and we will roll that out as quickly as we can.”
Workman said brokers have been heavily involved in the bank’s digital development process.
“We spent a lot of time looking through broker feedback, through hundreds and thousands of cases that we’d actually underwritten to take the learnings from that.”
He continued: “[We thought] back to the priorities for a broker from our Paragon proposition and undertook research with the broker networks that we’ve been involved in to set out that journey.
“But as soon as we started development, we established a community of brokers and landlords and we were able to use them throughout the build and development of the platform,” said Workman.
Brokers completed video interviews or were given “missions” that enabled them to try out parts of the platform and feed into the development process.
Workman said its development work has targeted some of the “pain points” in the BTL specialist market for brokers and landlords, but also responded to the positives, freeing up staff to spend more time speaking to brokers, for example.
“The feedback was to keep it simple and not overengineer things,” said Workman, adding that Paragon is targeting key areas, including the complexities of handling the property portfolio for landlords.
“So we’ve been working on this for well over a year now, and as each stage has become available throughout the application journey, we’ve tried to use that to play back to brokers and get feedback. We will roll it out as quickly as we can.”
Watch the interview [07:37] in full below.
Look out for the next two videos in the series, with Arindom Basu, Digilytics’ founder and CEO, outlining the time-save that real-time underwriting checks will offer brokers and the lender alike, to run on 1 August.
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