The Intermediary – October 2026 - Flipbook - Page 38
The Interview.
Finova
Lofty ambitions
Jessica Bird speaks with
Gareth Richardson, CEO at
Finova, about the ambitious
prospect of a fully connected
mortgage market
one is the mortgage market of
old, relying on wet signatures
and fax machines, personal
relationships and brokers
conjuring criteria off the
dome. Not only can brokers
check sourcing systems that
span more criteria than one
person could hold in their head in a matter of
seconds, but digital communications alone have
revolutionised the work of mortgage broking.
Now, as artificial intelligence (AI) reaches its
digital feelers into every aspect of our lives, this
market has the opportunity to fundamentally
change how property finance is sourced,
processed and serviced.
Realising that ambition will require
changes to established workflows, industry
collaboration, vastly improved data sharing and
– perhaps counterintuitively – a renewed focus
on the value of human advice. The Intermediary
spoke with Gareth Richardson, CEO at Finova,
to understand whether this is possible, and
what must be done to get there.
G
36
The Intermediary | October 2026
Richardson has been in the CEO seat at Finova
for a little over a year. His foundations are
in software engineering, and having worked
across varied industries, he brought a fresh
mindset to the finance sector, which led him to
be instrumental in moving UK banking into the
cloud and revolutionising core banking tech.
He strikes a good balance between sitting
outside the market enough to avoid the risk of
getting set in its ways, while also having a solid
grounding in all things finance – from regulation
to the problem of legacy systems.
Richardson says: “[I have] rolled out digital
banking, but also transformation systems
to move people from old legacy mainframes
into cloud native core banking that runs
personalised products and personalised
structures. We spent a long time trying to solve
the problem of how the consumer actually gets
better services, better products. It’s a rethinking
of how products work.”
The goal to change how people engage with
finance is not one to be taken lightly, and the
mortgage market may be one of the hardest
to pull out of the old ways. With 63 lenders
and 2,500-plus brokers using its products, and
one in five UK mortgages passing through its
proverbial doors, Finova might just have the
clout to make change happen.
Richardson says: “That makes for an ability to
actually help customers and build some of these
products, start driving for the future rather than
being sat in the infrastructure layer trying to tell
people what the future could be.”
Finova represents the scale to be able to
make much-needed improvements to a market
that is built around “unnecessary friction,” and
to do it while standing astride both the lender
and broker side.
“This gives us the ability to start looking at
those silos, and understand what’s good for
lenders and what’s good for brokers, which
quite often is very similar,” Richardson explains.
Finova’s customers typically achieve around
1% to 2% straight-through processing. Even “the
vanilla stuff” often requires human intervention.
Richardson’s ambition is for 90% of mortgage
applications to be processed without human
intervention. While this is a hard mountain
to climb, it is achievable in theory, as while
