The company said a “significant proportion” of daily case administration is spent fixing, chasing or repeating work rather than progressing new cases.
Matthew Elliott, co-founder and chief commercial officer at Nivo, said: “The biggest thing stopping brokers and lenders completing more deals is the admin work gathering, checking, and chasing information and documents. Our AI agents are a perfect fit for this work, taking it on 24/7 so teams can move more cases forward faster at lower cost.”
The problem of ‘rework’
Nivo’s report, based on in-depth conversations with over 70 specialist lenders and brokers, found that many specialist lending teams are losing time to work that has already been done once, including chasing missing documents, correcting incomplete information, checking submissions, clarifying requirements and managing repeated broker-lender communication.
The company said a typical secured loan case can generate 15-20 message rounds, involve more than five people, and require upwards of five hours of administration on the broker-to-lender leg alone. Between 20% and 50% of cases are also stalling or failing to complete, with process friction identified as a more common driver than deal quality.
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Once borrower communication is included, the volume of messages, documents and effort increases further.
Small failures and time leaks
The report identified that the issue is rarely the complexity of the underlying deal. It is the accumulation of small failures at the point where information is collected, packaged, and transferred between parties. Some 35% of all cases require corrections or repeats.
The main ways that brokers lose time on these deals were chasing clients for outstanding documents – often across multiple attempts – checking whether what has been received is actually complete, current and accurate, going back to clients when something is wrong, missing or expired, managing status enquiries from clients and lenders that add message rounds without advancing the case, rekeying information into lender portals and systems, preparing application packs, and preparing them again when errors are identified.
Nivo said AI tools can help brokers to avoid the pain of admin corrections, though other experts have said some AI tools still require refinement when used in the mortgage business.
