FinTechTalk: Managing the Complexities of Digital Transformation in Mortgages with OSB, nCino and Publicis Sapient

Why lenders should look beyond technology to identify the right partners 

Mortgages come with their own peculiarities and complexities compared to other banking products, such as current accounts, savings, or deposits. The space is highly competitive, too. As Natalie Stacey, Senior Manager – EMEA Mortgage Product at nCino, notes, lenders not only face external and internal challenges around efficiency, profitability, risk, and compliance, but must also think carefully about how their value propositions make them stand out among rivals. 

 

Given the scale of a digital transformation project, mortgage lenders can’t go it alone. Identifying the right partners who will support and guide them through the journey is key to the project’s success. Stacey advises that lenders should always look beyond the software when choosing a partner and consider the vendor’s banking expertise, ability to understand clients’ pain points, and commitment to co-creation and innovation. 

 

OSB’s End-to-End Transformation Journey 

Following a merger, OSB-a UK-based specialist mortgage lender supporting underserved segments of the market, realised that the legacy systems they inherited were hindering their ability to deliver better customer experiences. Instead of undertaking an incremental transformation, the lender opted to overhaul both its back-end and front-end systems. This involved launching a new broker portal, deploying updated decision engines for credit, property, crime, and fraud risk, and designing new applications to improve underwriting, product management, servicing, and real estate workflows; in partnership with nCino, Publicis Sapient and a number of other vendors.

 

Publicis Sapient’s role included helping OSB identify the right mix of partners and creating a transformation framework to guide the process. A key lesson from OSB’s experience is the importance of working backwards: lenders should first define the customer experiences they want to deliver, then determine the technologies that can enable them, and finally choose the partners capable of executing that vision. 

 

Rather than harbouring grand plans for their digital transformation, OSB adopted a pragmatic approach, focusing on optimising co-creation and productive interactions with its partners like nCino. When working with technology partners, it’s also key for a lender to decide whether they want to adopt the vendor’s baseline platform—iterating and running pilots on top of it—or map out a bespoke path toward their strategic goals. 

 

nCino’s cloud-based and flexible platform played a key role in smoothing OSB’s radical transformation by supporting a phased, manageable roll-out. 

 

Transforming How Customers Work 

Technological transformation also requires changing how people work. OSB, for example, placed great emphasis on re-educating and training borrowers, brokers, and colleagues. This has been particularly crucial when onboarding brokers and their client landlords to Rely—their AI-dedicated buy-to-let lender platform. 

 

Mortgage lending still relies heavily on unstructured data: valuers traditionally submit narrative-style reports, while solicitors often follow paper-based workflows. As automation requires structured data, leveraging AI to extract and structure information early in the value chain is a logical first step toward achieving a truly end-to-end digital transformation. 

 

Measuring Success 

Metrics reflecting how different aspects of the loan origination process have accelerated are critical indicators of a project’s impact. Reducing the time from an agreement in principle to issuing a mortgage offer—which OSB has already achieved—is a major industry milestone. 

 

Brokers also benefit from end-to-end digital systems through increased decision certainty. Greater transparency helps them make stronger mortgage assessments and choose the appropriate processes for valuations or, where appropriate, proceed with straight-through loan disbursement. 

 

Although mortgage lending has long been perceived as slow to adopt new technologies, the panellists of this FinTechTalk demonstrated how strategic thinking grounded in customer experience, combined with strong technological partnerships and effective stakeholder support, can deliver outcomes that dramatically improve a lender’s competitiveness in an already saturated market.