Both advisers and clients increasingly favour online or telephone appointments over the traditional face-to-face approach

Remote client meetings, once a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, have now become a fixture for UK mortgage brokers. Both advisers and clients increasingly favour online or telephone appointments, drawn by the promise of greater efficiency and flexibility over the traditional face-to-face approach.

A lot of people prefer to just provide their documents, have a chat for maybe an hour or so over the phone or over email even, and just kind of do it that way, said Michelle Lawson, mortgage advisor and director at Lawson Financial. We’re definitely seeing that trend. And actually, I’m preferring it, to be fair.

Lawson noted that the shift was already underway even before the pandemic, but has now become standard practice.

Elliott Benson, broker and owner of Sett Mortgages, observed a similar trend. There was just a massive shift straight after lockdown where literally pretty much everything was remote, and that sort of fed through the next few years as well, where people are much more comfortable with telephone, Zoom, Teams, he said.

According to both Lawson and Benson, the adoption of digital tools for document signing and identity verification has streamlined processes.

There are so many different ways of interacting with the client now, such as electronic ID verification, Benson said. All the systems that I use have that inbuilt. You’ve got things like screen sharing software where you can talk a client through a document while they’re watching what you do.

All these things have just improved with time, which means that with the use of DocuSign and things like that, you can get a client through a whole process remotely if necessary, and very quickly as well, he said.

Lawson also highlighted efforts to further reduce administrative burdens. We’re almost kind of having one document that they have to sign, which is like a one-size-fits-all to say that they’ve had all of the documents and they agree with all of them as one signature, she said.

Lawson and Benson agree that remote meetings are likely to remain the preferred means of broker-client meetings. Remote’s here to stay, said Lawson. I don’t think we plan on changing. I think it’s actually a lot more efficient because we’re not wasting time, which is dead time, travel time when you’re going from office to appointment.