Advisers in the later life mortgage sector should make themselves more aware of the technology available to them while practicing caution, Key’s Will Hale said.
The chief executive of the later life specialist firm spoke to Mortgage Solutions about the use of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in this part of the market, and said it used to be a fair comment to suggest the later life sector lagged behind mainstream mortgages when it came to technology adoptions.
He said the nature of the process included many “moving parts” that made it “challenging from a technology perspective to streamline and automate”. However, he said things were changing and the advent of AI had “created more opportunities”.
Hale said firms should prepare for the take-up of technology with proper data collection, making sure this is gathered and stored “in a structured way”.
He added: “There’s a big opportunity for CRM systems to capture information about customers and the process that’s being worked through.
“That’s always the first building block for a firm; getting your data in a good, structured format.”
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Hale said this was not just figures and numbers, but also soft information that could be useful in streamlining operations.
At Key, all interactions with clients are recorded, which Hale said should be adopted industry-wide.
“We record all of our interactions and store them, which are really powerful tools of information,” he said.
How AI can support later life advising
Hale said Key was using AI and robotics for customer acquisition, adding “the more we know about the profile of customers that go on to… buy our products and services, the more we can use that information within how we look to market and nurture opportunities”.
He said AI was also used to give clients tailored, useful information, creating efficiency and opportunity.
On the advice and delivery side, Hale said AI and technology would not replace advisers but help them be better and more efficient at their jobs.
For example, if a broker is recording client interactions, AI could produce suitability reports, Hale suggested.
He said there could still be a manual overlay to tweak what is suggested by AI, but it would still reduce the time a broker takes to complete tasks.
AI can also highlight vulnerabilities and prompt an adviser to ask further questions or consider further interventions.
He added: “Picking up not just the use of certain words, but the sentiment, maybe any delays in response [that] might suggest a lack of understanding or that someone is hard of hearing”.
Further along on the journey, Hale said AI and technology could be used for quality assurance monitoring, saying compliance teams often did not have the time or resources to check all cases, but technology can.
Hale said that, post-application, AI could ensure communications with a client could be more efficient with nudges or chatbots to respond to common questions.
Hale said this could also be helpful when clients need answers to a question out of hours, or feel apprehensive about asking certain questions.
Capturing clients
He said many firms already outsourced customer acquisition tools, so suggested they “cast the net wide” when looking for partners to work with and consider companies using AI.
“In the later life market, finding clients is probably the biggest challenge, if you’re a later life specialist. We try to encourage more mainstream mortgage brokers as well, if they’ve got the customers sitting within their base, using AI or partnering with AI companies will look to nurture those customers, which will be a good use of time and effort,” Hale said.
Hale said there were many tools available, so it was on advisers to “lift their heads and open their eyes”, saying once the take-up of these technologies grew, they would improve.
Trusting technology with caution
Key uses proprietary tools for its in-house technology but also relies on external expert consultants to build its tools.
Hale said it could be true that brokers may not have enough trust and familiarity in newer technology, but said, like any other new developments, it would take time to get used to.
“Firms and particularly small businesses and individual advisers need to think very carefully before engaging with AI. They need to be very clear about how they’re using it, what they’re using and be careful about their intellectual property.
“If you are using some of those publicly available AI solutions, there may be short-term benefits from an efficiency perspective, but if you’re putting your information out there into the ether, your IP into the ether, that can be quite damaging going forward in terms of maintaining your competitive advantage and maintaining hold of your data.
“If you put your data into those external programmes, effectively that data is being used by hundreds or thousands of other people. People need to be really careful about the type of AI they use,” he advised.
As for the client base, Hale said many older people were already tech-savvy and had been using technology for a long time, so transacting in the later life sector should not be different.
However, he said there should not be a one-size-fits-all approach and practices should suit different needs, rather than push people down a certain channel.
