A groundbreaking simulator that helps lenders redesign their mortgage journey has been launched by Novus Strategy, the transformation consultancy for the mortgage and home buying industry.
Novus built Pathfinder so lenders can solve problems like prioritisation and sequencing before committing investment.
It helps them understand the benefits of upfront information, Smart Data and the Government’s reform roadmap, which have all suddenly created an unprecedented opportunity for meaningful transformation across home buying and selling.
But there’s a problem. While all lenders are determined to solve speed-to-completion, reduce fall-throughs and increase lending capacity, many are hampered by the risks involved with transformation programmes and confused about what to do first in the face of competing initiatives.
Pathfinder solves this problem. It enables them to simulate how they can redesign that journey, both internally and externally, using their own real-world data. So it offers a safe, risk-free environment where they can experiment with new partnerships, vendors and an enhanced customer experience.
Consequently, lenders come to understand how they can identify which initiatives are a priority for them right now, based on where the dependencies are and how much value they are likely to realise. But it’s more than a simulator. The platform presents financial and efficiency gains in real-time with lender benchmarking and a Vendor Radar helping to provide them with a detailed roadmap and procurement options, with defined benefits for the business.
Novus will be demonstrating Pathfinder at its Digital Disruption Live event at the Everyman Theatre in Manchester on 23rd September.
With a wider lens, Pathfinder is how lenders will understand what Horizontal Digital Integration (HDI) means for them. Whereas earlier phases of transformation focused on digitising tools and processes within organisations, HDI defines how digitally mature, independently operated systems function together as a whole.
Kevin Duncan, Pathfinder Product Director at Novus Strategy, said: “Pathfinder gives lenders a pathway they can be confident of investing in, because it shows them what the outcomes are likely to be.
“It’s a marked change in how lenders approach innovation and transformation. In the past, innovation programmes relied on analysis and recommendation. With simulation, lenders can literally see the outcomes before they invest. That’s why the simulator is going to prove game changing for these lenders at a critical moment for the industry.
“Pathfinder is the catalyst that tells them what they need to do to help bring down time-to-completion, and we’ve already shown that the entire redesign process can take as little as four weeks, even for a larger lender. Given that the industry has more of a configuration problem than a technology problem, none of this necessarily warrants changing vendors or rebuilding solutions, and all lenders have the chance to make very quick gains.”
How Pathfinder works
Pathfinder is completely personalised. It allows lenders to build their existing mortgage journey as a digital twin before generating a heatmap that identifies the total number of friction points in that journey. It then measures their impact on the metrics that matter most to lenders, such as fall-throughs, speed to completion and, ultimately, lost lending opportunities, which includes capital velocity - the number of times a lenders’ capital turns over each year.
Mapping includes all the elements they’re managing from Digital Verification Services (DVS) and KYC to decision in principle, credit decisioning, valuation, affordability, and underwriting. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, Pathfinder’s ultimate power lies in its ability to simulate what would happen if this journey was redesigned and complement that with vendor assessment, industry benchmarking and prioritisation. That extends to what happens between offer and completion, a big area of concern for lenders, where inefficiency has a huge impact on their businesses.
With the time to exchange having hit 134 days from a sale being agreed, there’s a significant opportunity to streamline the transaction process and materially reduce delays across chains1. Pathfinder shows lenders what their mortgage journey looks like now, how it compares to competitors and what they need to do next.
