MORTGAGE brokers are often warned that AI and technology could eventually threaten their jobs, but this one believes the opposite could happen.
Matt Coulson, founder of Rickmansworth-based Heron Financial Ltd, has spent years investing in technology designed not to replace mortgage advisers, but to strip away as much of their repetitive administration as possible.
The result, Coulson says, is that Heron advisers typically produce around four to five times the industry average while having more time to speak to clients.
For Coulson, that apparent contradiction sits at the heart of the business. The more technology Heron can put behind its advisers, the more human he believes the experience can become.
He said: “The whole point of the technology is to enable us to be even more human. If you can take away all the manual, clunky and laborious parts of an adviser’s job, you give them more time to actually sit down and talk to clients.
“Our advisers are doing around four or five times what the industry average is, but that doesn’t mean rushing people through. It means we’ve stripped away a lot of the work that doesn’t need an experienced adviser doing it.
“That’s the obsession within the business. How do we keep removing the things that take an adviser away from having conversations with clients?”
Heron was founded in 2011, after Coulson had already experienced one of the most turbulent periods the mortgage industry had seen.
He entered financial services after leaving university, initially taking a junior role at a small financial advice firm in the North East. He subsequently completed his mortgage qualifications and became an adviser.
Then the financial crisis hit.
Coulson watched lenders disappear and the company he worked for shrink from around 40 or 50 people to only a handful. He survived the cuts partly, he jokes, because he was young, inexpensive and willing to turn his hand to almost anything.
Technology
He later moved to London and eventually co-founded Heron Financial in September 2011.
He said: “When we started Heron it was very much seat-of-your-pants stuff. It was asking which estate agents we knew, who might give us introductions and who we knew who needed a mortgage.
“We grew organically, but from quite early on I became obsessed with process and productivity.”
That focus was partly about consistency. Coulson had seen businesses where the quality of a customer’s experience could depend heavily on which adviser happened to deal with them. He wanted Heron to create processes that made consistently good service easier to deliver.
The company expanded into new-build mortgages and developed relationships with major housebuilders before diversifying further through employee benefits, providing mortgage education and advice through large employers.
Today, Heron employs more than 40 people, with technology increasingly providing the infrastructure underneath the business.
Coulson estimates Heron has spent around eight years developing its own technology platform.
One of the fundamental aims has been eliminating the need to repeatedly type the same customer information into different systems.
Clients can complete information digitally and provide documents before speaking to an adviser. Credit information can be available earlier in the process with permission, while mortgage sourcing technology is integrated into the system.
Coulson said: “Every time somebody has to rekey something, it takes time and you increase the possibility of making a mistake.
“We want the adviser to come into that appointment with the information already there. Their day should predominantly be conversations with clients rather than moving information from one box into another.
“The ambition is basically to make all the boring bits dead easy.”
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being added to that infrastructure.
Technology can produce a transcript of a client meeting and help prepare the suitability record, picking up information and priorities discussed during the conversation.
Coulson sees it almost as an additional assistant sitting alongside the adviser, helping with the administrative work surrounding the conversation rather than attempting to replace the adviser having it.
Heron has also developed an AI assistant called Lily, which can make initial contact with existing customers approaching the end of their mortgage deal and arrange an appointment.
Coulson said around 40% of customers contacted through the system book directly through Lily, which openly identifies itself as AI.
He said: “If somebody is sitting on their sofa at nine o’clock at night watching Netflix, why shouldn’t they be able to fill in their fact-find, send us their documents and move things forward?
“People experience slick technology in virtually every other area of their lives. They expect it.
“But then when they want to have that conversation and talk through what they should actually do, there is a real person there with years of experience.”
Coulson believes that distinction will become increasingly important as consumers themselves start using AI.
Heron is already encountering customers who appear to have used tools such as ChatGPT or Claude before their appointment. They can arrive unusually well prepared, having researched their circumstances and organised the questions they want to ask.
But despite having access to increasingly sophisticated technology, they are still choosing to speak to an adviser.
Coulson said: “We’re seeing people come to us incredibly well prepared because they’ve clearly done a lot of work with AI beforehand.
“But they still want to speak to somebody. They still want to sense-check what they’re doing and ask, ‘Am I making the right decision?’
“There’s an emotional side to buying a home that I think means there will always need to be a human in the loop.”
For Coulson, that is where Heron’s productivity figures become more important than simply allowing the company to process more mortgages.
Prepared
If technology can handle information gathering, repetitive administration and parts of the follow-up process, an experienced adviser can devote more time to conversations that cannot easily be reduced to boxes on a screen.
Clients may want to discuss whether now feels like the right time to move, whether they should stretch their budget or what an adviser is seeing among other borrowers in similar circumstances.
Coulson said: “Those are the relationship conversations. That’s what we want more of.
“If technology gives the adviser more time to have them, then technology hasn’t made mortgage advice less human. It has done exactly the opposite.”
The productivity drive has another advantage for a company operating in a famously cyclical industry.
Having begun his career during the financial crisis, Coulson has subsequently experienced Brexit, Covid, rapidly rising interest rates and repeated economic and political shocks.
He believes running a relatively lean and productive business gives Heron greater ability to deal with the inevitable peaks and troughs in mortgage demand.
His vision is therefore not one in which AI gradually replaces Heron’s mortgage brokers.
Instead, he wants machines handling more of the work that advisers never particularly wanted to do in the first place.
Coulson added: “We have to lean into this technology. If mortgage brokers and financial advisers put their heads in the sand and pretend AI isn’t going to change the industry, we’re going to be in trouble.
“But it’s about getting the balance right. Use technology to take care of the process, make everything slick and seamless and remove the painful bits.
“Then let advisers spend their time doing what clients actually came to them for: having a conversation and giving them advice.”
