Client story
Yorkshire Building Society
Mortgage Sales & Originations (MSO) case study
“Everything is done much faster”
Accord Mortgages, part of the Yorkshire Building Society group, is an award-winning lender with one of the highest Net Promoter Scores in the industry. A result of a major business transformation to improve the broker and customer journey.
Part of this project was rolling out Iress Mortgage Sales and Originations (MSO) software. In just over a year, it's achieved a huge step in delivering a faster, more efficient service for brokers.
Paul Howley, director of IT and transformation at Accord Mortgages/YBS, spoke to us in September 2021 about transformation, a solid partnership and working through the pandemic to break business records.
"A product with a clear vision and roadmap"
“The Accord Mortgages brand represents around 80 percent of the total Yorkshire Building Society lending business. With the intermediary channel being so vital we needed to change the way we did business to stay ahead competitively.
About five years ago our systems and processing were manual and lacked efficiency. We knew we needed to do something and our transformation project was born.
Our strategy was to not just look for a vendor, but someone to help us create a better broker experience, secure regulatory compliance and to be able to take advantage of a product with a clear vision and roadmap.”
Our fastest offer has turned around in a couple of hours, and 20% of cases are processed in five days or less.
Director of IT and Transformation, Accord Mortgages/YBS
Mortgages done in a day
"Following the launch of MSO into the Accord Mortgage brand and an intensive onboarding programme, 18,000 brokers could use MSO. With support from across the business, and the hard work of our colleagues, we can now process low-risk, straightforward cases straight through to offer with less human interaction. Our underwriters are free to spend more time focusing on complex cases, working closely with the brokers who submitted them. And we’ve explored new lending territories and niche product areas, using our people’s expertise where the roadmap allows.
The efficiencies have also allowed us to deploy some of our underwriting team to other areas where they need to support customers. MSO has also offered us additional capacity in processing applications, which has been a great support."
12 months of MSO at YBS:
- Efficiency doubled
- Increased lending volume and the number of cases underwritten in a day
- A fifth of all cases now processed in five days or less
- Provided greater transparency for brokers and the ability to self-serve
- Freed up to explore new business and niche lending opportunities
The end of rekeying with Lender Connect
“We are now looking to adopt Iress Lender Connect which will allow brokers to submit business to Accord Mortgages from their own CRM systems, without the need to rekey, saving brokers significant time on each case. There’s still lots to do, but we are excited to be looking ahead at this, and are working closely with Iress as this project continues to roll out.
There are lots of providers that can offer technology, so what we’ve worked on with Iress is to develop a mutually beneficial relationship where we both share our expertise and develop our propositions to provide the best outcome for the market and our brokers. This would be the real definition of a partnership.”
There are lots of providers that can offer technology, with Iress we've developed a relationship where we both provide the best outcome for the market and our brokers.
Director of IT and Transformation, Accord Mortgages/YBS
