Mortgage Magic Blog

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What rekeying data between your CRM and sourcing tool is really costing you

October 29, 2026

Nobody publishes a reliable figure for how long UK brokers spend retyping client details between systems, so any number you see quoted without a source should be treated with suspicion. What can be shown is where the cost sits. It is not mainly in the minutes. It is in the errors that enter when data is retyped, the records that stop agreeing with each other, and the cases that stall because something was wrong the first time. The part you can count yourself Time is the easiest cost to measure and the least interesting one, so it is worth doing quickly. Pick five recent cases and note every system where the client's details were typed in. Count the systems. Then time one case from first entry to the last. To see how it adds up, assume for illustration that retyping costs ten minutes per case, and that you complete 40 cases a month. That is 400 minutes, just under seven hours a month. The ten minutes is an assumption, not a measured figure, and your own number may be higher or low...

Managing SM&CR on spreadsheets, what it is actually costing your network

October 19, 2026

A spreadsheet costs nothing to open, which is exactly why its real cost rarely gets counted. For a network, that cost shows up in four places: rules that change while the sheet stays the same, errors nobody can see, evidence that cannot be produced when the regulator asks, and hours that never appear on any invoice. None of it is dramatic on a given day. All of it surfaces at once when someone outside the firm asks to see the record. What a principal firm actually has to keep track of SM&CR sits with the principal firm, not with its appointed representatives, which means the network carries the accountability for what its ARs do under the agreement. In practice, that gives a network a set of recurring, date driven obligations. A named Senior Manager needs to be accountable for oversight of the ARs. Staff of the network itself who hold certification roles must be assessed as fit and proper and certified every year. The FCA must be notified at least 30 days before a new AR is a...

Is AI sourcing worth it for a solo broker doing under 50 cases a year?

October 15, 2026

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...

Referral and affiliate income for brokers, a revenue line most firms ignore

October 07, 2026

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...

Black box vs glass box, what explainable AI actually means for a mortgage recommendation

September 29, 2026

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...

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