The days of brokers manually examining clients' documents are "over" following Nationwide's approval of the Smartr365 platform.
Speaking at the 'Future of Mortgage Technology' event, Smartr365 founder and CEO, Connor Murphy, said: "The days of having to see clients face to face to collect credit reports and bank statements and then manually look through and stamp and certify those documents are over."
These comments follow the announcement of Smartr365's open banking platform gaining approval from Nationwide.
Explaining this platform, Murphy stated: "The output of open banking is data and the mortgage industry tends to run on paper.
"The challenge in the intermediary sector is how do you convert the data into paper and then put it into a format where people can actually use it, and that’s the part that Smartr have done."
To meet this challenge, Murphy stated that Smartr365 had converted data from open banking back into paper and then had lenders approve the paper.
Murphy detailed that, following Nationwide's approval, if brokers have Nationwide applications today they can submit the open banking statements from Smartr365 straight through to Nationwide.
"The underwriter will accept those in place of a Barclays branded or Nationwide branded bank statement and the application would flow through", he further explained.
Murphy also stated that Smartr365 had wrapped the underlying open banking service in its Homebuyer app and put it in a format where it can be used by a customer.
"This allows brokers to pull through credit reports at source for any of their clients within the mortgage application journey and therefore assess their credit before you submit the mortgage application."
Murphy acknowledged that, in isolation, this provides "real benefit" to brokers but that he felt that including it alongside open banking has "way more benefit".
Smartr365's approach seems unique at the moment as Murphy stated: "Nobody else in the market has done this and we don’t see anyone else in the market doing it."
This doesn't seem set to change as Murphy said that it was his belief it will remain that way either forever or "certainly for a long time".
Nationwide's approval follows HSBC's, which was announced back in June.
tom.dunstan@ft.com
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