Speaking on a panel discussion at The Mortgage and Protection Event (TMPE), chair Clare Beardmore, director of mortgage club at Legal & General (L&G), read a question from delegates asking if removing the advice trigger was a “land grab” from big banks and an attempt to “marginalise” advisers.
Paul Adams, sales director at Pepper Money, said many big banks were not built to take that much business.
“Think of how much work you take off the big banks in terms of processing to try and get cases over the line. Also, when you think about customers, their perception of the mortgage process is horrific.
“You take a lot of that away from lenders,” he added.
Jonathan Stinton, head of intermediary partnerships at Coventry Building Society, said advisers should “not forget their strengths” and said it was understandable that they would worry about execution-only, but said it was another form of competition, just like fellow advisers.
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Stinton added: “They can potentially do business that you can’t – that doesn’t mean you aren’t a great adviser, that doesn’t mean you aren’t delivering amazing value to your customer, day in, day out.
“But does the customer actually understand and appreciate the value that you give them on a day-to-day basis, or do they think you just sort the mortgage out for them? Because you do more than sort the mortgage out for them, and that’s what execution-only is doing, sorting the mortgage out for them without that human interaction. What is the value of that human interaction, and how can we demonstrate [that] to the client?”
He said this gave clients the choice to see the value of an adviser and decide to use them.
Stinton said: “I don’t think large lenders are trying to dictate the environment so that clients come directly to them. What we need to remember is: why are you here? Are you a better adviser today than you were last month or last year? The answer would be ‘yes’, so why does your client not realise that? And they need to know that.”
Emily Hollands, group head of distribution at OSB Group, said if advisers looked at clients holistically, execution-only could help because it would allow people to handle one part of the process, leaving advisers to focus on “the bigger piece of advice”, such as protection and more complex parts of the sector like buy to let (BTL).
“I don’t necessarily think it’s harmful,” Hollands added. She said OSB had no plans to make any changes to its execution-only process, saying brokers were “at the heart of everything we do and that will continue”.
Adams said there was a need to ensure that people who went through direct channels still got protection and believed advice was an option even after rejection.
Interested in attending TMPE? Register here for the Southampton and London events, taking place on 12 and 13 November.
Read the coverage from this year’s event here: TMPE 2025: Mortgage market ‘on track’ to outperform UK Finance expectations
