NatWest first UK bank to offer paperless mortgages

As the great wave of digitalisation continues to move through financial services and words like ‘Fintech’ and ‘Blockchain’ hum around boardrooms of financial institutions across the world, the digital future seems to be getting ever closer. Yet still these seem to be merely buzzwords at this point, largely being sounded off by CEOs staging a ‘who can look the most interested’ competition at Sibos.

However, we shouldn’t let this take away from some of the genuinely revolutionary work being done both outside of and within major financial institutions. And with the formal launch this week of NatWest’s digital paperless mortgage process, some of this groundbreaking work has reached mortgage lenders.

The lender began the process 18 months ago, looking to boost overall customer experience and improve mortgage turnarounds and following a rigorous process of redesigning and testing the product managed to go live with a pilot at the beginning of the year, before reaching the launch version in June.

This improvement in turnarounds and customer experience seem to have been already born out with bank proclaiming a fastest turnaround so far of five working days, with a couple speaking to their mortgage adviser on a Saturday morning and completing and receiving their keys on the following Friday. Whilst according to the bank’s figures, the time between initial mortgage appointments and offers are 10 days faster and time for remortgages could be down to 24 hours.

The service will initially be available to all direct customers and work on a process of online verification and digital signatures being backed up by telephone advisors, and despite the different challenges faced rolling it out to the broker market is something on the horizon to.

One thing that’s for sure is NatWest have made a real play for what they believe should be the future and it will be interesting to see how fellow lenders follow, be that with similar systems of their own or ploughing their own course. With PSD2 and Open Banking approaching over the horizon and all the opportunities they bring, we can’t wait to see what the future holds as we approach the age of digitisation.

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