Speaking at The Specialist Lending Event, Lewis Wilcock (pictured), head of technology at Brickflow, said: “I think the key takeaway is I don’t think the AI replaces brokers at all. I think they’re key to all of this, but I do think that brokers who adopt these technologies, even just technology without AI, will outperform those who don’t.”
He noted that the mortgage market today was “inefficient” and brokers were spending a lot of time “manually searching the market”.
“It’s a lot of ‘who you know’ relationships. The quality varies widely between brokers and lenders, and who you go with is who you know or who you’ve most recently seen marketing from, which is not generally the best way to pick who you want to work with.
“For lenders, the numbers we have suggest about one in 25 cases convert, so it’s a lot of time you’re spending on cases that are never going to go anywhere. There are huge costs in origination and processing. There’s a massive admin burden for everyone involved and, in general, there’s a very low technology adoption,” he said.
Wilcox said the specialist lending market was a bit behind in technology adoption compared to the residential market, which was starting to adopt things like basic calculators, virtual tours and so on, but there was some movement in the market.
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“I think generally, there’s been a big reluctance to move with the times, but I think it’s now critical to staying competitive,” he noted.
More borrowers using AI search for information
Wilcox noted that around 65% of borrowers were starting their mortgage journey with an AI search.
“A lot of those searches [are] ending without a click, so they’re just taking what comes back from the AI tool, and they’re trusting it,” he noted.
A report for McKinsey suggested £750bn of spending will be influenced by AI search, “so getting yourself into those AI search tools, into those results… will be a really valuable thing for you”.
Wilcox added that those going onto the AI search tools are not going to the websites as much anymore.
“I think… in general, from my understanding, not being in the space for very long, the journey is very lender-centric. I think that will have to shift to being more borrower-centric. They care a lot more about having a good experience than they have done in the past,” he noted.
Wilcox said recent research found that 80% of borrowers said the experience a company provides is “as important as its products or services”.
“That is talking about the speed and quality of your response. You can have the best rates on the market and really good advice about it, but… if you’re not transparent about the advice, you’re not quick, and you don’t make that person feel like you care about them, you may lose out to someone else.
“The expectations are just different. Probably 20 years ago, we started adding our own websites, now there’s expectation to be able to apply online and maybe there’s expectations of API integrations and things like that, but the expectation is that you’re using AI tools, and you’re visible in them, and you’re integrated with them,” he added.
He said this was “not an easy thing to achieve, but it should get easier as these tools get better”.
“I think fundamentally, though, without your experience, your knowledge and your advice, they’re not going to get a good product. They’re not going to get a good experience. You can use the AI tool to ask questions, maybe it finds some things that you missed but, fundamentally, you are the experts, and you are the ones who are going to give the final say,” Wilcox said.
He said tools should be used to “augment” the broker’s expertise and should not necessarily be trusted wholeheartedly.
AI can help with admin, identifying fraud and client communication
Wilcox said administrative tasks are the ones that AI “can help with probably the most”.
Examples include validating documents, searching the internet and checking Land Registry for information about sites. These can be done in the background while you are working on other things and it can produce a report for you, he noted.
The automation of client communication was another example, which he said could help “build trust”.
This did not have to be an immediate response, but AI tools could suggest a response for you or find documents that clients are asking for, so your responses can be timelier.
Another example is helping to identify fraud cases, as some tools can help identify whether documents have been manipulated.
“The key thing to think about there is if you can reduce the amount of time spent on these admin tasks, that’s more time you can spend on more valuable activities. That’s outbounds, advice, conversations and referrals.
“Fundamentally, that leads to more revenue for you and your business, and even more importantly, it means no increase in the hours, because it’s just improving your efficiency at work, not just work[ing] harder or work[ing] evenings,” Wilcox explained.
He explained that the suggested model for AI adoption was the “augmentation model, so the human stays the absolute core and most important part of the journey”.
“Use AI and technology to try and augment your workflow. Figure out process improvements. Figure out what am I doing each week that I could maybe hand off to one of these tools, or maybe I can build a small tool with ChatGPT that helps me to better manage my loan products or something like that,” he said.
Wilcox said companies who use these tools well are seeing a 20-30% productivity increase per person effectively, which means up to 20% more cases per adviser.
He added that there was also “potentially reduced compliance risk, improved retention and reduced dependency on administrative people”.
However, he warned that people can “definitely use these [AI tools] very wrong and cost yourself a lot of time”.
“They’re definitely more of an amplifier, rather than a guaranteed additional time gift,” Wilcox said.
On the commercial side, Brickflow was increasingly seeing AI replacing external software-as-a-service (SaaS) contracts, like CRMs.
“We see more and more brokerages in installing their own CRM that they’ve effectively vibe-coded, so someone has built it with ChatGPT in-house. It’s a custom workflow that works perfectly for them. They have full control over it, and it doesn’t cost a couple of grand a head per month to have it,” he said.
How to get started in AI
When asked how to start exploring these tools, Wilcox said ChatGPT was a good first port of call to “see what it does”.
He added that there are also free or cheap online courses with Anthropic or Google that can be informative.
“It’s definitely concerning when I see new tools come out and people blindly connect it to everything, like their email, with no due diligence on where is this data going. There [have] been multiple cases of it not being [secure] and then all of your data is publicly available, and you know, that might include the keys to the kingdom for your business.
“You do need to be extremely careful, so potentially hiring a consultant or a full-time engineer to look at and manage all of that stuff for you, or potentially, if you have an IT team, they could advise on all of that stuff,” he added.
Wilcox recommended that brokers use an enterprise subscription for AI tools, which is not much more money than a regular subscription, but it means that your data won’t be trained on.
“When they train on your data, there’s potentially a human reviewing it and it’s potentially going into the model, and very smart people have figured out ways to extract that data from the model.
“It’s another attack vector for people who want to steal your data, so you don’t want to be putting in anything that would be considered sensitive customer data, unless you’ve got one of those enterprise subscriptions where it’s safe to do so,” he added.
Wilcox said to stick to “main vendors”, like Google, Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude, as “they’re more likely to be playing by the rules”.
He concluded: “We know borrowers are more and more beginning their journey in AI. We know brokers are spending a lot of their time on admin, uninteresting tasks and less valuable tasks. We know that AI can help to improve time to advise. We know that speed dramatically increases conversion.
“We know that providing a great experience to your borrower is more important than ever and could lead to lifelong relationships with that borrower, fruitful to both of you. I think AI adoption and tech adoption in the right way can increase revenue and reduce costs.
“I think that the winning model is human plus AI, so if there is one takeaway from today, I think it’s to give these tools a go. You might be pleasantly surprised. You might be scared, like I have been, but I think you have to be investigating them.”
