The Intermediary –- June 2026 - Flipbook - Page 46
T E C H N O L O GY
Opinion
{Reality
he pace of technology
adoption at the
natural junction of
brokering, lending and
development has never
been so aggressive,
and one of the glaring issues in our
industry is the gulf between the old
way of doing things and the brave new
world we are all in.
One of the key drivers in our
business is to ensure that we are not
trading away tech acumen for deeper
experience, as deeper experience in
development finance is the niche
you’re providing your clients, that
is the cherished value add, but there
must be a middle ground.
If your team think LLMs once
toured with ELO, the tech stack is
the shelving unit for the hi-fi, and
AI agents are the enemies of ‘The
Man from Uncle’, you are in trouble;
but in the same breath, if your team
has no understanding of banking
outside of downloading an app, has
their heads in the Microso cloud
24/7, and delivers credit reports filled
with the Em dash tell of the ChatGPT
digital performance enhancer, you are
equally as doomed.
Across the industry, you need to
take the middle ground to win the
bale for market share.
T
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The Intermediary | June 2026
There was probably a version of
this article that began with a statistic
about the construction industry’s
productivity problem. Something
about how output per worker has
barely changed over the past decades,
while almost every other sector has
been transformed by digital tools.
It is a compelling stat. It is also, by
now, overused.
So, let’s start somewhere much
more useful to the readership. You’re
a broker, you’re siing across from a
developer client whose deal has just
fallen through because their cost plan
was out of date, their programme was
built on assumptions that evaporated
six months ago, and their lender lost
confidence in numbers that nobody
could actually verify in real time.
That scenario is avoidable,
expensive, and increasingly common.
You know this because you know
what happens when the development
world treats technology as optional. It
is not optional anymore. Those who
understand that will serve their clients
beer, close more deals, and spend
considerably less time managing the
fallout from preventable problems.
Based on faith
Development finance is, in essence, a
confidence exercise.
ALAN FLETCHER
is partnership director
at Invest&Fund
The lenders are being asked to
believe that a project will be delivered
on time, within budget, and at a
gross development value (GDV) that
justifies the loan.
Every element of that belief
rests on raw data, cost projections,
programme assumptions, market
comparables, contractor track
records, and planning risk
assessments.
The problem is that, for most of
the industry’s history, that data has
been assembled manually, updated
sporadically, and presented in formats
that make it genuinely difficult to
