The Intermediary – October 2026 - Flipbook - Page 81
T E C H N O L O GY
Opinion
Taking risks:
The confidence
advantage
M
ortgage
underwriting
has always been
an exercise in
confidence.
A lender
needs confidence in the customer,
confidence in the property and
confidence that the information
supporting a decision is sufficiently
accurate to justify commiing capital
for perhaps the next 25 or 30 years.
What is changing is the amount of
information potentially available to
support that decision.
We have spent much of the last
decade talking about digitisation
in mortgages as though speed
were its principal purpose. Faster
applications, valuations and offers
undoubtedly maer. But there is a
more important prize available. Beer
information should allow lenders to
be more confident about the decisions
they make.
That maers because the housing
challenge facing the UK is not simply
about increasing the number of homes
available, but those homes will also
need a functioning mortgage market
capable of financing their purchase.
Building the bigger picture
Lenders therefore have an important
role in supporting housing growth,
but understandably must balance that
ambition against credit, valuation,
environmental and operational risk.
This is where the thinking behind
Cotality’s Lender Hub becomes
interesting. Lender Hub connects
lenders, panel managers and
surveying firms within a single
valuation workflow, providing
real-time case tracking, automated
valuation triage, post-valuation
query management and access to
property risk information. The wider
integrated platform can connect
into lenders’ existing mortgage
origination systems or decisioning
platforms through Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs) rather
than requiring them to replace their
underlying technology.
The significance of that is greater
than making the valuation process
more efficient. Historically, lenders
have frequently had to assemble a
picture of property risk from different
systems, datasets and participants.
A valuation provides one part of that
picture, environmental information
another, energy performance another
and the lender’s own credit policy
determines how all those pieces should
ultimately be interpreted.
Bringing those elements together
changes the nature of the decision.
Instead of asking how quickly a
valuation can be completed, we
can increasingly ask how much we
can know about a property before
deciding what level of valuation,
scrutiny or human intervention it
actually requires.
That is a much more useful
application of automation. Our
technology already processes the
overwhelming majority of UK
valuation instructions through its
surveying soware, while Lender Hub
allows configurable rules to determine
whether an automated valuation
model (AVM), remote valuation or
physical inspection is appropriate.
Risk notifications can also identify
issues earlier in the process.
The purpose is not to remove
the surveyor or underwriter, but
to help them take advantage of the
data opportunities that exist. A
straightforward property supported
by strong data should not necessarily
require the same journey as an
unusual property where information
MARK BLACKWELL
is chief operating officer
at Cotality
is incomplete or conflicting. Equally,
automation should not become an
excuse to overlook complexity simply
because a transaction happens to fit
within predetermined parameters.
The opportunity is to direct human
expertise towards the cases where
judgement creates the greatest value.
Trust and confidence
The definition of property risk itself is
expanding and the amount of property
information available will continue
to grow. The challenge for lenders
will therefore be less about obtaining
data and increasingly about making
it usable.
More data does not automatically
create more confidence and so the
value comes from bringing trusted
information together, understanding
its relevance and presenting it at the
point where a decision is made.
This is why the next stage of
mortgage technology may be less
about automation than orchestrating
the lender, surveyor, valuation,
property information and risk rules
within the same ecosystem.
For policymakers there is an
important point here too. If the
Government wants lenders to support
greater housing construction, then
encouraging access to trusted property
data should be part of that ambition.
The industry should continue
the conversation about opening
appropriate datasets and creating
the infrastructure through which
they can be used safely. The objective
should not simply be to persuade
lenders to take more risk but to give
them the confidence to understand
risk beer. ●
October 2026 | The Intermediary
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