The Openwork Partnership
2024 was really, really tough for mortgage advisers, with stress levels at times off the scale. Reworking cases multiple times, often with a race to secure products before they were withdrawn, was all too frequent an occurrence.
As if this wasn’t enough, the regulatory burden on firms increased, operating costs rose, lender processes and technology changed, and clients’ needs and expectations continued to become more complex.
At times it must have felt like a perfect storm! Given events across the pond and the priority being placed on housing by the new government, it seems almost inevitable that we are in for another eventful year in 2025. Delivering great outcomes for mortgage clients against this constantly changing backdrop is a massive challenge and one that can only be achieved if advisers and lenders work together and trust each other.
it’s positive to see a remarkable level of consistency in the results for 2024 versus 2023
Rated for Service is all about giving a voice to the mortgage advising community, providing the opportunity to call out lender excellence but also highlight performance that makes the task of delivering excellent service to clients a virtual impossibility.
The Openwork Partnership is therefore delighted to sponsor Rated for Service for the third year running. Whenever I talk to our advisers about what they want from lenders, the word ‘consistency’ regularly comes up, so it’s positive to see a remarkable level of consistency in the results for 2024 versus 2023, with the Top Rated lenders across both mainstream and buy-to-let retaining their status. Congratulations to them and also to Pepper Money and The Mortgage Lender for achieving Top Rated for the first time in the specialist category!
There are more changes in the Rated category and I’m really pleased to see MPowered gaining recognition. I also have to give a call-out to Barclays, which, after two years of being in the lower end of the table, has achieved Rated status in both mainstream and buy-to-let. This is a major turnaround, heavily influenced by its response to feedback from advisers!
As with the previous surveys, the verbatim comments are a goldmine and help make the numerical scores come to life. In total, advisers provided almost 750 verbatims, of which 55% were ‘positive’ and 45% ‘negative’, very much in line with last year. Interestingly, the product and underwriting areas received the highest ratio of ‘positive’ to ‘negative’ comments, with technology gaining the least. While significant progress has been made on technology by several lenders (NatWest, for example, was singled out), there is still some way to go.
The ratio of ‘positive’ to ‘negative’ comments by lender is also valuable and provides a useful barometer of the strength of adviser feelings. This, along with the numerical results, will be fed back to lenders as part of Openwork’s regular lender review meetings and will hopefully help drive further service improvements.
The new section of the survey, regarding support to advisers from lenders, clubs and networks, is a positive addition. The results are strongly positive, which suggests that relationships overall across the sector are in a good place. They also give a clear steer to lenders to focus on support on products, criteria and processes, and to provide a mix of face-to-face and digital engagement.
Thanks once again to Mortgage Finance Gazette/Mortgage Strategy for running the survey, and most of all to the advisers who took the time to give the adviser community a voice!
2025 is going to be lively, but it’s interesting that, as the industry has proved time and again in recent years, we often perform at our best in the eye of the storm!
Paul Shearman, mortgage proposition director, The Openwork Partnership
All the data for the Mortgage Finance Gazette Rated for Service 2025 is now accessed via a dashboard. All the ratings data for each lender category, and all the rankings data for each assessment area, is available from the past three years. Lenders’ performance in any of the five assessment areas can now be ranked from highest to lowest across the entire lender panel for each year, and filtered based on broker type and case load.
This year we have also added factor analysis for each lender category, so brokers will be able to benchmark their chosen panel of lenders against the average score for each assessment area (max. of five lenders).
The dashboard brings an unprecedented level of clarity to lender service levels for the broker community. We’d like to hear your feedback in the comments section below, or email piers.johnson@emap.com.
Please see the full dashboard below:
Please click on the cover below to see the print supplement of Mortage Finance Gazette Rated For Service 2025.
