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A new era of innovation? The community should embrace post-pandemic efficiencies John Goodall Chief Executive Officer Landbay
significant lenders had a lot of problems, just being able to enable home working with the lack of technology and, while everyone’s got there now, it’s not ideal for many.
Positives from the pandemic
I
t is without doubt that the current pandemic has changed the way we work. At hardly any other time in history has the rate of change been what it has been over the past few months.
However, many companies, not just in financial services, had the unexpected surprise that staff performance did not drop off in the way most expected with staff working from home. In fact, many companies have changed their future plans as a result with some, such as Twitter, declaring they may keep staff working from home indefinitely.
Landbay was in a very fortunate position in that it has state-of-the-art technological platforms on which to run the business. So, we made the transition to home working relatively easily and brokers should have noticed little or no difference, but I know that for many banks and lenders this was an altogether more challenging time.
Whilst I suspect, long-term, the default option for many lenders will be working from the office, there may be some exceptions and there will be changes.
The challenge for the industry was that we hit a period of economic stress at the same time that people were being told to put their business continuity plans in place, which may not have been tested to anywhere near this extent. Lenders were in a completely unprecedented situation with staff working from home, often with reduced staff numbers if some were unwell. At the same time, there was unparalleled demand from borrowers to access the different government schemes, not least of which was payment holidays for both homeowners and buy-to-let landlords. On top of this they needed to ensure they still complied with all FCA and Treating Customers Fairly regulations. As a regulated business it is harder to comply with all the rules with staff working from home. For example, being able to carry out remote call recording as seamlessly as you can if you are doing it from one central place. Early in lockdown, several reasonably 22 | NACFB
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We will see new initiatives from existing specialist lenders and also other providers to the industry. If anything, COVID-19 is going to stimulate these to come onboard more quickly
