Keeping up to date with criteria shouldn’t be a memory test

Now, it’s important to say that I didn’t have an opportunity to chat with this broker. He might well have advised on an incredibly niche sector of the market with just a handful of lenders and been able to keep track of all relevant changes but honestly, that seems unlikely.

If you were to try to memorise all lending criteria it might interest you to know that we currently report on over 50,000 pieces of criteria from over a hundred lenders.

To memorise this would be mind-boggling and if you had the capacity to commit such a feat (and you really should have some sort of stage show if you could) it would still only be half of the problem.

The problem with relying on your memory, however good, is that the information is static. There is no automatic update button in the brain (but how great would it be if there was!!) The challenge comes down to the sheer scale and frequency of criteria changes happening every week in our market. To put it into some sort of context, in April 2018 there were almost 4,000 updates to existing criteria and over 5,000 new criteria from 105 lenders added to our criteria sourcing system. These numbers merely highlight the infeasibility of the task of keeping up to date on all criteria without some sort of technology to help you.

So the realisation that you can’t commit criteria to memory is a great start point of that famous phrase; ‘knowing what you don’t know’.
Without trotting out Donald Rumsfeld’s full speech about known knowns and known unknowns (mostly because it would make my head hurt to think about it too deeply), it highlights the issue of whether brokers know what they don’t know i.e. are they aware of criteria changes happening behind the scenes? The FCA has also realised that criteria is key in ensuring a fair outcome for your client.

In its report the regulator asked “What would be required to ensure that lenders can provide intermediaries with the means of identifying (earlier) products for which consumers qualify?” In many cases the answer to that question is being able to identify the criteria for which a client qualifies and often that may well be with a smaller lender that the broker hasn’t dealt with before.

I’ve spoken before about how lenders shout about big ticket criteria changes, but many smaller, more regular changes fly under the radar. Increasingly therefore, committing information to memory simply won’t keep pace with change – or provide all the information that the client needs and it seems the FCA requires.

I could buy the 32 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica but it seems easier and requires considerably less shelf space to have Google on my phone. And most importantly, the information is current and not historic.

In short, brokers aren’t diminishing their expertise or professionalism to use tools rather than their memory, focusing instead on the use rather than the retention of the information.

All that clients care about is that brokers have all of the up to date criteria information at their fingertips and because this function can be outsourced to a system, brokers can save hours or days of research and ensure that they give their clients an even better experience.