The Intermediary – October 2026 - Flipbook - Page 39
I N T E RV I E W
many applications are relatively simple, the
technology and workflows supporting them are
unnecessarily complicated.
“You have broker tech providing them with
better capability, but they can’t bridge the
gap into the lender side and tie those things
together,” he explains. “We’re looking at
bringing those things closer together while
making brokers’ lives easier, so they can give
a better experience to customers. We can also
give lenders the ability to do things faster,
quicker, and fundamentally serve customers
better and bring better products to market.
“Technology has a huge enabling capability
if it’s done right, and it can also be a massive
barrier if it’s done badly.”
From broker tech to origination systems,
Finova is looking to bring the market
together and create a fully end-to-end
connected process. The final frontier of this is
conveyancing, which Finova also recognises as
a challenge for the industry.
Rather than going direct to conveyancers,
as it has with broker and lender tech, Finova
is partnering with firms like LMS and PEXA to
“drive that market into a better approach.”
When Richardson joined in June 2025, the
business was in the final stages of a year of
work to integrate the MSO business, which it
acquired from Iress in 2024.
Finova has also acquired Cubit Labs, an
AI tech company focused on intermediary
workflows and compliance, with “a lot of really
focused people who’ve been in the industry
a long time.” Richardson’s job is now to bring
these various teams together under the Finova
banner, with a shared vision and strategy.
In the meantime, this has been a defining
year for the technology market, and change has
only accelerated during Richardson’s tenure.
“When I turned up, AI in mortgages was a
trend that we knew we should be looking at,”
he says. “By Christmas, it was real and making
an impact. During that time, we’ve hired more
than 50 people in Manchester to grow our
AI hub. That’s building jobs in the UK, with
apprenticeships as well, so that we can have an
ecosystem that’s healthy.”
Interoperability
Brokers have access to any number of tools to
help them do their job day-to-day. The issue
is not access to technology, but whether that
tech delivers on its promises to create a more
efficient advice process. The missing piece,
Richardson says, is interoperability.
Application programming interfaces (APIs)
have so far been the central tool. However,
Technology has a huge
enabling capability if it’s
done right, and it can also
be a massive barrier if it’s
done badly”
these are still limited, Richardson explains:
“APIs have tried to save brokers a load of
time, but when a set of APIs will only work for
these 10 lenders, it doesn’t work across the
industry. A broker’s workflow needs to change
depending on which lender they’re going to
talk to. And those APIs will only go threequarters of the way. They’ve still got to go to
the lender portal anyway. At that point, quite
frankly, as a broker I can’t be bothered. I’m just
going to go to the portal, because you’re going
to send me there anyway.
“Therefore, you’ll take 20 minutes on a case
keying it in, if you’re lucky. If you’ve got adverse
credit or other complexities, then it’s an hour
and a half to three hours. If that lender says no,
the process starts again.”
Finova recently launched its Broker Hub, an
AI-powered platform including its whole-ofmarket tool ‘Agentic Apply’, which takes the
rekeying burden off brokers’ hands, leaving the
world of cobbled-together APIs in the past.
“It’s ‘AI, not API’, which means that we can
do end-to-end, full flow, any lender – we’ve
trained it across all of them,” Richardson says.
“That 20 minutes goes away. The machine
does it for you. It then gives it back to the
broker to review, because it’s their case. We’re
not taking that away, we just make it easier.”
Richardson says this should be “invisible,”
and that neither brokers nor lenders will need
to change their workflows or platforms.
The next challenge will be convincing
the brokers themselves. As with many new
advances, there are early adopters and
sceptical laggards.
“Let’s take the demographic of brokers in the
UK,” Richardson says. “You have 30% or 40%
skewing towards the later end of their career.
They can do all the complicated cases, they
have great relationships with their customers
built over a long period of time, and can advise
on lots of different complicated property types.
They’ve got their workflow. It’s become really
honed over the years, and they know how
they’re going to execute it. Then you’ve got
a younger cohort that doesn’t have the same →
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