On one hand, Mr Cowan, who is executive chairman at Sesame Bankhall Group, says there are the digital players who can cut out the face-to-face middle man.
On the other, there are the lenders who, once they have secured a borrower through a broker, in theory have a customer for life. The broker in effect is out of the picture once the transaction has been completed.
Mr Cowan says: “It makes for a strange business model. We need to move to a place where we have this new mortgage adviser. What you want to do is to find the client, stay in touch with them and repeat.”
What this looks like is what Mr Cowan and his management team are busy trying to work out.
SBG brokers mortgage loans, via the Sesame brand, and has in-depth knowledge of the pensions and savings/investments market, as a result of the compliance work the Bankhall division does with more than 900 financial planning businesses, but it does not have a licence to provide wealth and investment advice.
This was not always the case. Friends Life – now part of Aviva – bought IFA network Sesame for £75m from software provider Misys in March 2007.
In 2013, it launched a strategic review, led by Barclays Capital, into the network. That same year the business was fined £245,000 for advice failings in relation to Keydata life settlement products, and £5.8m for system and control weaknesses across its investment advice business.
Then, in April 2015, Sesame announced it would be closing its appointed representative network for wealth advisers.
Mr Cowan was brought out of a non-executive chairman role to come in and clean up the business. Into his 51st year in the industry it might be hard to believe that this is a profession he did not intend to get into. Journalism was actually his passion.
Despite being accepted into university, by his own admission he was not the most attentive student, developing a love for travelling instead.
Hitchhiking around Europe
He toured Europe as a hitchhiker, which found him in Paris in 1968 at the time of the notable student protests. Coming back to the UK he got a job at Scottish Amicable.
More than 50 years and several companies later he is at SBG.
“[The company] is now in a very stable place and has been growing for the past two or three years. It has rock-solid systems and controls around it with good management,” Mr Cowan says.
SBG has three parts: the appointed representative network Sesame, mortgage club PMS, and support services business Bankhall.
He says: “The future world [of mortgage broking] is going to be challenging.
“A lot of the tasks brokers carry out now could be taken over by machine learning in the future. They have to demonstrate how to add value, talking to customers about how to protect their family, how they protect their buildings, involving conveyancing and solicitors, etc.
“We are also examining [the concept of] financial planning and wealth, and we have a variety of solutions.”
Reinstating wealth advice?
It might sound like Mr Cowan is saying there are plans to reinstate wealth advice into the business, but he suggests that is more of a question mark than a statement.
“It’s where we were as a business. Never say never, but it does not feel like that,” he says.
“The single biggest difference from the business before was that as the business transitioned from its difficult year, it dropped permissions for advisers to give investment advice and we are looking again at all of that.
“Customers need advice on their mortgages, protection, pensions and savings. They need help [on all of that]. So how do we join that up?”
Another big focus for SBG is using technology to free up the time advisers have, so they can speak to clients more, not just about mortgages and protection, but they can go beyond that to help customers understand more about finance, particularly debt.
The technology the group is developing will reduce rekeying, allowing for easier links with other sites – enabled by application programming interface technology – to help brokers do their work more efficiently.
The company estimates that on average it takes a mortgage broker 554 clicks and four hours before a typical mortgage application is completed.
Engaging the next generation
He wants brokers to be thinking about how they plan to future-proof their business by engaging the next generation, who may have minimal assets now but in the future will grow.
Mr Cowan is juggling a lot of thoughts, alongside the rest of his management team, which now includes Michele Golunska. She has just joined as chief executive of SBG from Aviva, where she was operations director for workplace savings and retirement.
Ms Golunska will report into Mr Cowan, who continues to lead the SBG board as group chairman.
When he does decide it is time to hang up his boots, there is another job that in his dreams he would love to be waiting for him – that is, as chairman of Celtic Football Club.
Until that becomes a reality, Mr Cowan is content with his role in helping take SBG to the next stage.
Ima Jackson-Obot is deputy features editor of Financial Adviser and FTAdviser
