Mortgage Magic Blog

  Politically exposed person screening and sanctions screening get talked about as though they are one check. They are not. They come from two separate pieces of legislation, they carry different consequences for getting them wrong, and one of them has just been substantially reformed in the opposite direction most people assume. Treating them as a single combined tick is exactly the kind of shortcut that recent regulatory reviews have found firms taking, and it leaves gaps in both directions. PEP screening, what actually changed and why it matters now Under the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds Regulations 2017, a firm must identify whether a customer, or the beneficial owner of a customer, is a politically exposed person, meaning someone entrusted with a prominent public function, or a family member or known close associate of one. Where that applies, the firm must carry out enhanced due diligence rather than standard checks. What has changed is how dome...

  UK Finance 's latest annual lender ranking, published in July 2026, put total gross mortgage lending at £282.1 billion for 2025, up 20.1 per cent on the year before. Outstanding mortgage balances grew by just 3.3 per cent over the same period. That gap between the two numbers is the story. Lending volume is up sharply, but very little of it is new debt sitting on the books, most of it is churn, remortgaging, redemptions, and product transfers moving between and within lenders. A mortgage club sits directly inside that churn, aggregating broker volume across a wide panel and negotiating what that volume is worth to each lender on it. The basis on which a club proves that value has changed. The panel a club represents has gotten harder to track Alyson Perry, head of strategic partnerships at Sesame Bankhall Group , put this plainly when the UK Finance figures came out. Balance growth among the big six lenders was essentially flat, while specialist lenders moved much faster, Vida Ho...

There is a difference between an AI system that recommends something and an AI system that acts on it. Most of the AI already in UK financial services, including in mortgage sourcing and case management, sits in the first category, it proposes, and a person decides. Agentic AI is the shift toward the second category, systems that carry out multi step tasks on their own, chasing a document, adjusting a case, moving money, without a person approving each individual step along the way. That shift is genuinely underway. The question worth asking is not whether it arrives, it clearly is, but which part of a mortgage business should be the first place it gets real autonomy, and the honest answer is that mortgage advice itself is a poor candidate to go first. Where the current momentum actually is, and it is not mortgage advice FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi told an industry audience in June 2026 that more than 80 per cent of financial services firms are already using or adopting AI, and th...

  Going from one adviser to five is one of the most common growth steps a mortgage brokerage makes, and the tech stack question that comes with it usually gets asked the wrong way round. People ask what new software they need. The more useful question is which regulatory obligations actually change when headcount grows, and which stay exactly as they were, because the tech stack only needs to change where the obligation does. What genuinely does not change The core shape of a mortgage case stays the same regardless of team size. Fact find, sourcing, suitability assessment, submission, completion, that sequence does not get restructured because there are five advisers doing it instead of one. The substantive regulatory bar does not move either. The Mortgages and Home Finance Conduct of Business Sourcebook and Consumer Duty apply at the same standard to a firm of one and a firm of five. What widens is the scope the standard has to cover, not the standard itself. Qualification require...

  Most lenders put real effort into how a new product launches. Rate sheets get built, marketing copy gets written, sales teams get briefed. What the broker engagement data actually shows is that very little of that effort is what gets noticed first. Brokers are not browsing a headline rate table the way a lender might hope. They are searching for a specific answer to a specific client's specific problem, and the lenders that win their attention are the ones who make that answer fast and unambiguous, not the ones with the best looking product page. The volume of searching is real, and it is growing Knowledge Bank , the criteria search platform used across the UK mortgage market, now hosts more than 170,000 pieces of live criteria data covering 270 lenders across eight lending types. In January and February of this year alone, brokers ran close to 200,000 criteria searches on the platform. That is not a small number of advisers casually checking a rate. That is a market actively int...

  Before writing this, it is worth being upfront about one thing. Nobody publishes a month by month breakdown of exactly when fixed rate mortgages come to an end. A Freedom of Information request asking for precisely that figure was turned down in 2023 because the data simply does not exist in that form anywhere in government, and UK Finance would charge to produce it. So there is no clean answer to which specific month counts as peak season this year. What there is, is a much more useful set of numbers about scale, timing mechanics, and where the volume actually ends up going, and that turns out to matter more than the calendar does. The scale is not in question UK Finance estimates around 1.8 million fixed rate mortgages are due to expire in 2026, up from 1.6 million in 2025. Product transfers are forecast to reach £261 billion this year, alongside a further £77 billion in external remortgaging, a 10 per cent rise on 2025. Product transfer activity does not appear in official mea...