Mortgage Magic Blog

  Often yes, but not for the reason most vendors give, and not in every setup. The honest answer depends on whether the tool replaces something you already pay for, in money or in time, or whether it simply adds another subscription on top of a process that already works. What the arithmetic actually looks like Take the full Prometheus plan at £85 per seat per month, excluding VAT. That is £1,020 a year. Spread across 50 cases, it costs £20.40 per case. At 25 cases, it costs £40.80 per case. Now set that against what a case earns. Procuration fees typically run between 0.35 and 0.5 per cent of the loan, which is roughly £800 on a £200,000 mortgage at 0.4 per cent. That is an illustration, not a promise, and your own average will differ. On that figure, the subscription costs roughly 2.5 per cent of a case at 50 cases a year, and roughly 5 per cent at 25. One more calculation matters. The annual cost of £1,020 is a little over one such proc fee. So the tool clears its own cost if i...

  Most conversations about broker income start and end with procuration fees, and protection commission where the adviser is qualified to write it. There is a third layer sitting underneath both of those that rarely gets treated as a real part of the business, referral income from conveyancing, general insurance, and protection the broker does not personally write, plus a newer layer of platform and affiliate income running alongside it. None of it is large on its own. All of it is close to passive once it exists, and most firms never build it into how a case actually runs. What this revenue line actually is There are really three distinct sources here, and they tend to get lumped together when they should not be. Conveyancing referral is the most common, a broker refers a client to a conveyancing firm or panel and receives a fee when the case completes. One broker writing about their own figures put this at around £300 per conveyancing referral, and a disclosed referral fee docume...

  Two terms get used almost interchangeably in AI marketing at the moment, black box and glass box, and the gap between them matters more in mortgage advice than in most other applications of this technology. A black box system is one whose internal reasoning cannot actually be traced by the people using it, even when the output itself is accurate. A glass box system is one where that reasoning can be traced. Most of what gets called explainable AI does not distinguish clearly between these two things, and in a market where a suitability decision has to remain defensible for years after it was made, that gap is not a minor detail. What actually makes a model a black box Complex models, deep neural networks and large ensemble models in particular, map a large number of interacting inputs to an output through so many internal parameters that even the people who built the system often cannot fully trace, in a way a human could read and follow, exactly why one specific case produced on...

  The decision between licensing a white label platform and building proprietary technology in house is not a new one for mortgage networks. What has changed is how much it now costs to get wrong. A platform choice that looked adequate three years ago is increasingly the thing holding a network back from meeting requirements that did not exist when the contract was signed. Fignum's inaugural Mortgage Tech Pulse report, published in April 2026 and based on conversations with senior leaders across more than 40 UK mortgage lenders, put this shift in blunt terms. For many firms, the cost of maintaining the status quo is now viewed as greater than the disruption of changing core technology. That finding comes from lenders rather than networks specifically, but the underlying pressure sits underneath a network's technology decision just as directly, since a network is running the same case management, compliance, and servicing infrastructure at a different point in the same chain. Wh...

  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...