Mortgage lending experience for Brokers
Pivotal, Scalable, and Far-reaching experience and journey, optimised for mortgage brokers in EMEA
TL;DR
Ncino Broker Portal 2.0nCino runs on a cloud banking core. A mortgage product built on it has to be just as modular, just as fast, and just as intelligent.
Problem
Road to be a pioneer
The team took US banking operations and reshaped them for EMEA, then built the core product our lender clients relied on.
The feedback was okay. But one big slice of the market stayed out of reach: the broker, and through them, the homeowner.
No time lost
The catch was speed.
A broker portal sat outside lenders’ existing channels, so building one took time and resource they’d rather not spend. They needed a broker experience that was fast and dependable, ready to roll out, not another long custom build.
Heavy lifting, on us
A broker carries a heavy queue: 40 or more cases a month, where everyone chases the same business.
Most lender portals made that harder, clunky and slow, worst of all at the FMA approval stage. Communication between brokers and underwriters was old-fashioned, and that gap lost clients.
Solution
Pivotal
The pivot was easy to say and easy to skip.
We had piles of client feedback and almost none from the people who’d actually use the portal. So I started with them: brokers. Out of that came a proper broker persona and the raw behavioural data to build something that would hold up. The lesson was clear.
Scalable
A portal had to be scalable, save everyone’s time, and fit the core system without dragging in more vendors or third-party tools. So I built from systemic components with page structure and a clear implementation path, working with engineering to produce a ready-made package for the portal channels, not a pile of one-off screens.
Far-reaching
The business case was hard to argue with.
85% of UK mortgage applications come through brokers. Getting their experience right wasn’t a UX nicety, it was the chance to be first in the industry with something built for them. The result: a scalable product, and a £1.5m deal, the mortgage team’s first.
High-Fidelity
Ncino Broker Portal 2.0Approach
Ncino Broker Portal 2.0Pivotal
A Broker is not the mortgage advisor you meet at a high-street bank. Brokers work independently and at volume (based on primary user research): hundreds of customer enquiries by phone, hundreds of live applications, every week. The pressure is constant, and getting a buyer their first mortgage is not the end of the relationship. The same customer comes back for rate switches and remortgages.
Broker needs to apply fast and track everything in one place, because their day has no room for a portal that fights them.
The legacy product was designed for a person who did not exist in this market. Once that was clear, the project stopped being a tidy-up of form elements and became the real one.
“A smoother application wins. I’ll recommend that lender even when the rate’s slightly higher.”
“If the form’s easy to fill, talking to the core banking? then, don’t need to input same thing two, three times…”
Scalable
Lending portals in the market were hard-coded and due to the fact, they were clunky: every lender’s requirements bolted on our hand, every change a small rebuild.
I strongly pushed the “modular” product and its flexibility. Components and patterns that flex across different lenders’ policies, criteria rules and features, with each client’s requirements built in rather than wired in from scratch. Our own in-house specialists could then implement it without starting from zero each time.
Of course, not easy to build the one without losing anything but heavy lifting should be on us, not on clients. Building and implementation time dropped by roughly 65%. Not because anyone worked faster, but because the second build no longer cost as much as the first.
Impact
Ncino Broker Portal 2.0
Far-reaching
The part I am proudest of is who ended up backing it. The Brokers themselves (during tests) supported the redesign, and that moved the commercial conversation. Client buy-in followed, and so did the numbers: a 34% lift in conversion, and a £1.5m deal, the first six-figure retail lending contract in EMEA.
None of it would have landed without rapid prototyping and a short, honest line between design and engineering. We tested ideas quickly and fixed things while they were still cheap to fix. That rhythm, more than any single screen, is what carried the work from a brief into something brokers actually wanted to use.
What my team says about me
“What stands out vs. a lot of colleagues I work with, is that she forms her own opinion (vs. just looking at requirements).”
“She asks good questions during the processes to help both herself understand key needs and also challenges us to think outside the box.”
Interested in the full breakdown? Let’s talk!
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