What brokers actually respond to in a lender's product feed
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 interrogating lender data at scale, case by case, before a recommendation is ever made.
What is worth noting is that this volume is not shrinking as AI tools get involved, it is growing. Early usage data from Knowledge Bank shows brokers running more criteria searches per case, not fewer, as AI assisted tools help them ask more precise questions rather than replacing the search itself. Brokers are not outsourcing their scrutiny of a lender's criteria to a machine. They are using the machine to scrutinise more thoroughly.
What gets searched is narrow and specific, not the flagship product
The clearest signal of what actually earns attention comes from looking at which searches are rising fastest, rather than which products get the most marketing spend. Recent bridging search data on Knowledge Bank showed sharp growth in very specific, niche criteria terms. Directors loan criteria climbed as limited company landlords looked for short term funding. Splitting title deeds jumped from 32nd to 10th place in the rankings. Re bridging allowed rose from 22nd to second. Searches related to expatriate borrowers climbed from 24th to eighth. None of these are headline product searches. Every one of them is a broker trying to establish whether one particular, often unusual, client scenario has a home with a specific lender.
This is the pattern that matters for anyone building a product feed. The parts of a lender's data that actually get engaged with are the edge cases, the criteria a broker cannot find written up clearly anywhere else, not the standard product terms that appear on every rate table in the market.
Static documents lose, live data wins
Knowledge Bank has been direct about why this shift has happened. Lenders have traditionally published criteria as downloadable documents on their own websites, and those documents go stale the moment lending policy changes, leaving brokers at risk of working from information that no longer applies. That staleness is precisely the problem brokers are routing around by using live, continuously updated criteria platforms instead of a lender's own PDF.
West One, a specialist lender, acted on this directly. In March 2026 it integrated a live criteria search tool onto its own website, giving brokers instant answers of Yes, Not accepted, or Please Refer, each with an explanation attached, rather than expecting a broker to read through a policy document to find the same information. Marie Grundy, the lender's managing director of mortgages, said the aim was to make it easier for brokers to understand what the lender would and would not accept. That is a lender adjusting its own product feed specifically because it understood what actually earns a broker's attention, and it was not the marketing copy.
Engagement now looks like a conversation, not a broadcast
The strongest evidence that brokers want more than a static feed comes from Knowledge Bank's Criteria Clinic series, live sessions where brokers question lenders directly about specific scenarios. The most recent one, held in July 2026 and focused on houses in multiple occupation, brought together Zephyr, LendInvest, Family Building Society, Keystone and Paragon, and drew more than fifty brokers who came with real client cases to discuss. Jason Wilde, head of sales at Paragon, described these sessions as giving lenders and advisers a genuine platform to collaborate on the issues actually affecting the market. The session did not stay theoretical. It led directly to Knowledge Bank adding six new criteria questions to its platform, built from what brokers said they were missing.
That feedback loop, a lender answering a real scenario and the answer becoming part of the permanent record other brokers can search, is closer to what broker engagement now looks like than a one wa+y product announcement ever was.
What this means for how a product feed should actually work
Put together, the pattern is fairly consistent. Broker attention concentrates on live, structured data over static documents, because static documents go stale and brokers know it. It concentrates on specific, edge case criteria over headline product terms, because that is where the genuine uncertainty sits in a real case. It rewards a clear, explained answer over a well designed brochure, because a broker's job at that moment is to find out whether a case fits, not to be sold to. And it responds to lenders who treat criteria gaps as something to fix quickly, because the alternative is a broker who tries once, gets an unclear answer, and moves on to a lender who did not make them work for it.
For a lender building or reviewing a product feed, that points to a few practical priorities. Structured, live data should carry more weight than a PDF or an email bulletin, because that is where broker trust now sits. The specialist and non standard scenarios deserve as much clarity as the standard ones, because that is where the search volume is actually concentrated and where a case is either won or lost. And whatever signal exists about where brokers search, hesitate, or give up entirely is worth treating as real market feedback, not just a byproduct of running a platform.
Mortgage Magic™ is built exactly for this, on the lender side of the platform, showing which parts of a product and criteria set are actually being used, and where a broker's search trails off without an answer, rather than only finding out later that a case went somewhere else.
Comments
Post a Comment