The Intermediary –- June 2026 - Flipbook - Page 64
T E C H N O L O GY
Opinion
Unlocking the
mutual sector’s
growth ambitions
A
t the recent Building
Societies Association
(BSA) Annual
Conference, the
scale of the mutual
sector’s ambition was
made clear. The BSA’s formal growth
plan aims to double membership over
the next decade, while the Financial
Conduct Authority (FCA) deputy chief
executive Sarah Pritchard stated that
building societies and credit unions
continue to play a vital role in the
financial services landscape.
However, achieving that growth
requires more than just ambition. It
requires a fundamental rethink of
how technology is deployed to serve
members and manage risk.
The mutual sector faces a specific
set of challenges, oen operating with
limited resources, yet understanding
that modernising their operations is
an existential necessity.
The danger is that, in aempting
to keep pace, lenders fall into the trap
of horizontal thinking, layering new
technology onto fragmented legacy
platforms to solve isolated problems
rather than rethinking the underlying
processes.This is particularly true
when it comes to AI. The UK mortgage
market is currently characterised by
fragmented experimentation. The
focus has largely been on generative
AI tools capable of producing content
or answering questions. While
these tools have value, they cannot
complete a task autonomously. The
real transformation will come from
agentic AI, which can be directed
to achieve specific goals or execute
defined actions independently.
Our independent research paper,
‘Intelligence in Motion’, argues that
the immediate opportunity for lenders
is not wholesale transformation, but
friction removal.
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The Intermediary | June 2026
Task-oriented agentic AI can be
deployed today to handle document
validation, checking payslips and
supporting documents against
application data in real time to flag
discrepancies and potential fraud.
This delivers faster decisions and
beer submissions without requiring
a complete overhaul of core systems.
For building societies aiming to
double their membership, capacity is
a critical constraint. Agentic AI offers
a way to scale operations without
a linear increase in headcount.
By automating the extraction and
validation of data, underwriters are
freed from the burden of manual
document handling. Their expertise
can be focused where it is genuinely
needed: complex cases, nuanced risk
assessments and the relationshipdriven lending that defines the mutual
sector’s value proposition.
Overcoming barriers
The barriers to meaningful AI
adoption are rarely technical. They
are structural and cultural. The UK
mortgage market suffers from a
chronic lack of digitised property data.
With an estimated 1% of property data
currently digital, the conveyancing
process remains a significant drag on
the end-to-end journey. Furthermore,
the fragmentation of the data supply
chain means that, while simple
income verification is becoming
easier, assessing self-employed
borrowers or those with complex tax
arrangements remains difficult.
AI investment is too oen viewed
purely as a transformation cost, rather
than a revenue-protection and costreduction tool.
The fear of disruption and
regulatory scrutiny can lead to
paralysis. Yet, as our report makes
clear, the infrastructure for AI is
JERRY MULLE
is managing director
at Ohpen UK
already in place. The constraint
is adoption.
Building societies do not need to
build these capabilities in-house. A
partner-led model allows lenders to
access agentic AI without taking on
excessive delivery risk. This approach
enables progressive adoption.
Lenders can begin by applying
agentic AI to quality assurance
processes, using historical data to train
the system. This generates the labelled
data required to build production
agents while delivering immediate
improvements in compliance and
oversight. The ultimate destination
is a source-data-driven mortgage
journey, where applicants authorise
access to verified data once, and the
process flows seamlessly from there.
Credit decisions could be compressed
from weeks to minutes, and proactive
servicing could identify customers
heading towards repayment stress
before problems become acute.
The transition to this model
will not happen overnight, but
the groundwork must be laid now.
Lenders that delay investment in
agentic AI risk falling behind
The mutual sector has a unique
opportunity to leverage its trusted
status and relationship-led approach,
but it must be supported by tech.
For the sector to realise its growth
ambitions, it must move beyond
fragmented experimentation. The
technology exists to remove the
friction that currently defines the
mortgage process. The challenge now
is for lenders to embrace agentic AI,
not as a novelty, but as the operational
foundation for their future growth. ●
