Remaking Mortgages

Buying a new home is an exhilarating but stressful process. Applying for a mortgage shouldn't be. One of the high street's largest mortgage lenders needed help to redesign their residential mortgage service to achieve better outcomes for customers and their own business, in a heavily regulated, risk-averse industry.‍ Design a process that’s better for customers, advisors, everyone. Offering better advice, more transparently, and twice as fast. Our client wanted to launch an improved service quickly, but was constrained by an unwieldy, hard-coded system that stifled the advisors' conversations and forced them to adhere to a rigid script.‍ We learned everything we could about the existing process; observing advisors on calls, listening to their conversations with customers and identifying key opportunities to overhaul the process. We interviewed advisors, customers, compliance officers, underwriters and anyone else involved in the process to find out what they really needed and what their pains and worries were. We used this to map out the entire journey, overlaying customer and service provider thoughts and feelings, looking for improvement opportunities and shaping our strategy. ​‍It was evident that the system was a key constraint to giving customers and advisors the best experience. So the first decision we made was to take the system out of the equation during conversations with customers, and free up the advisors to use their considerable experience to get to the right outcome for customers. Then we sketched out a target process and role played it repeatedly with advisors, refining and adjusting until we got to a process that felt natural, streamlined, compliant and achieved a great customer experience. We developed a series of lo-fi paper prototypes to stimulate the conversation and enable advisors to record information pertinent to the customer's application. These prototypes and our role plays informed the design of a new digital interface, which we launched into pilot with real customers. 1. Average reduction in time to complete an application reduced from 3 hours to less than 1.5 hours 2. Customers know they can borrow the amount they need much earlier in their journey 3. Advisors give clear, tailored advice, so customers know exactly what they're borrowing and on what terms 4. Applications are more detailed, relevant and tailored