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In a mortgage market struck down by the credit crunch, it is all about spotting the latest trend and making sure you are aware of it and what others are doing to try and ride out the next massive wave heading towards you.

That was why the mortgage panel debate I hosted at Mortgage Adviser sister newspaper Financial Adviser's Expo event was so interesting as industry experts from two of the country's biggest lenders and two of the largest mortgage clubs and networks made their predictions.

Premier Mortgage Service, Legal & General, Nationwide Building Society and RBS Intermediary Partners revealed lenders were looking much more closely at the quality of business produced by certain advisory businesses.

This probe of the quality of mortgage clients being introduced by certain intermediaries would feed into decisions being made about the types of advisory businesses they worked with in the future, said John Malone, managing director of Premier Mortgage Service.

As he revealed exclusively to Mortgage Adviser and the IFAs gathered at Financial Adviser Expo, this would result in casualties among certain intermediaries and a kind of premier league of mortgage clubs and networks emerging.

At the end of the debate, a mortgage mdviser spoke to me and said he was concerned about what it would mean for his one man band business if this forecast for the future delivered by Premier Mortgage Service, Nationwide, RBS and Legal & General came to pass.

Did I think small intermediary firms like his would die a death because the big banks and building societies would only be willing to work with the large mortgage clubs and networks owned by financial services providers?

The trend of the last few months of lenders turning their backs on potential buyers without significant deposits shows with less cash to lend the banks and building societies want to make sure it is going to what they deem to be "quality" customers.

It is the natural next step of the death of high loan-to-value deals for lenders to study their arrears and repossession figures to find if a significant amount are coming from a particular intermediary business. It is these businesses that will get the cold shoulder from lenders and it is difficult to question why this would be a bad thing.

If people put rubbish into the lenders' system then they will be the ones that are looked at and weeded out. The quality of the work mortgage advisers do is more crucial now than it ever has been before to their chances of survival.

Emma Ann Hughes is editor of Mortgage Adviser