With industry observers predicting a busier mortgage and property market in 2025, now is the time to invest in a mortgage adviser CRM system like Surecase.

And with January the time when we hunker down to get ourselves in shape (physically, financially, professionally), now is the perfect opportunity to get your mortgage adviser workflow in top working order.

“Smash it”, “boss it”, “own it” “ace it” – whatever you want to do with 2025, here’s our quick guide to the key features of the Surecase mortgage adviser CRM portal that will help you play your ace game. Surecase co-founder Simon Horsfall tells us how.

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2025 is going to be hectic – here’s the proof

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But first, a quick bit of context. To give you an idea of how much busier 2025 could be, compared to 2024, here’s some key facts from UK Finance Magazine which sets the scene for this year as follows:

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The outlook for 2025 is for a gradual improvement in mortgage affordability, feeding into market growth. As interest rates tick down, we expect arrears to continue to fall with tailored forbearance helping those that need it.

This year, with more fixed rate deals coming to an end, we forecast growth in refinancing. As affordability continues to ease gradually, remortgaging is expected to grow by 30% to £76 billion, with PT business seeing lower growth of 13% to reach £254 billion”

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Here are some of their key 2025 industry trend predictions:

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• Gross lending £260 billion – up 11% on 2024
• Lending for house purchase £148 billion – up 10%
• External remortgaging £76 billion – up 30%
• Internal product transfer £254 billion – up 35%
• New buy to let purchase lending £9 billion – down by 7%

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The key Surecase features that will help you smash it in 2025

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Designed by mortgage advisers for mortgage advisers, the Surecase mortgage CRM portal has been developed with one overarching key objective – to save all of us valuable time.

Over 3 years in continuous development, the key benefits of Surecase are:

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• Proven, improved workflow efficiency
• Intuitive caseload updates and alerts
• Secure encrypted documentation
• Mortgage adviser-specific features

Improve workflow management with easy-to-see update notifications

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A big issue for all of us, we’ve designed the Surecase portal to make it simple and easy to manage all your mortgage caseloads at their various stages of progression. Surecase immediately alerts you to the cases where recent progress requires your attention – saving you time trawling through every case to see which one needs dealing with next.

Also, we’ve now enhanced this feature by alerting you to when your clients are active in their account – making it easy to send them a quick message. This means that you grab their attention and maintain the momentum of their case.

We’ve also built in account settings that enable you to give different access permissions to your team, which means that admin staff can work on the background progression of cases while you’re either seeing clients, or developing your new business client bank.

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Compliance and Consumer Duty made easy – as you go along

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To stay in business, you need to remain FCA compliant by being rigorous and thorough in your understanding of your client’s needs, while also meeting the FCA demands around customer protection with regard to best practice Consumer Duty.

Surecase can revolutionise the way you achieve your compliance and consumer duty objectives with our mortgage-specific Fact Find which is coming online in early 2025. Designed to capture all the key information you need on each of your clients, this ground-breaking feature is designed for speed, accuracy and efficiency by avoiding duplication of unnecessary fields. Data is securely stored for  retrieval further down the line for possible remortgaging or other repeat business.

Importantly, every piece of client documentation is securely stored and available for download to support all your compliance and consumer duty evidence.

E-signatures – maintain mortgage deal momentum and seal the deal

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Our most recently developed feature, e-signatures are now the fastest and most secure way of securing authorisation at each key stage in the progression of each application.

The benefits speak for themselves – no need to wait for hard copies to be sent through the post, or to find a time to capture signatures (often by more than one party) when there’s a random moment in the dairy.

Fully encrypted and protected, our e-signature facility gives both you and your clients the piece of mind you need on the integrity of the process.

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Seamless integration with Inteliflo Office makes the move to Surecase easy and stress-free

When so much rests on the data of your clients, and also your preferred way of working, we know that moving to a new format is not without its anxieties. We know it – we’ve been there.

By integrating the Surecase system with the Intelliflo Office interface, you get all the features of our portal within the advantages of a platform that you’re familiar with. We also recognise that data transfer from one system to the next can feel like a precarious act of faith, but we’ve covered this off with a rigorous data back up system to ensure safe and secure migration.

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Want to play your mortgage adviser “A game” in 2025?

Simply book a free 45 minute demonstration. Click on the link to choose a time and date and we’ll be in touch.

No obligation, just 45 minutes of your time – which could save hours and days in the year ahead.

Ready for a quick mid-Christmas quiz?

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No doubt you’ve had another busy year.  And with the festive season in full swing, why not make the most of your well-earned break to spend time with your family and friends.

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But if you do need to escape, indulge yourself in our quick Christmas quiz to help you stay in touch with the outside world – and give you a flavour of what’s to come in 2025.

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By the looks of things, it could be very busy. As our quiz will reveal.

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1. Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey recently forecast that there could be a series of mortgage rate reductions in 2025. How many has he predicted?

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1. Two
2. Four
3. Six

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2. The average value of a UK mortgage in the second quarter of 2024 was how much?

1. £95,000
2.  £129,500
3. £185, 565

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3. According to UK Finance, the total value of UK mortgage lending in 2024 will fall by about 5% to:

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1. £180 billion
2. £215 billion
3. £228 billion

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4. Rightmove is predicting 2025 to be a busy year with an expected number of completions in excess of 1 million. The number they’re forecasting is:

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1. 1.1 million
2. 1.5 million
3. 1.9 million

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5. The average UK first time buyer’s house price currently sits below the new £300,000 Stamp Duty Tax threshold. In what percentage of local authorities does this represent?

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1. 32%
2. 51%
3. 68%

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So, how well did you do? Here’s the answers.

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Question 1. B

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Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey recently predicted that there could be as many as 4 mortgage rate reductions in 2025, each one seeing a drop of a quarter of 1% each time, in effect a full 1% next year.

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Question 2. C

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Latest mortgage statistics from Find.Com mortgage reveal that the average value of a new mortgage in 2024 was £185,165.

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Question 3. B

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According to UK Finance total lending on mortgages is expected to emerge at £215 billion. This is actually a slight drop on the previous year of around 5%.

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Question 4. B

A report by Today’s Conveyancer carries a story stating that  Rightmove   is predicting 2025 to be a very busy year, with around 1.5 million transactions. The average number of properties for sale per estate agent branch is now at its highest in 10 years for the December period.

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Question 5. C

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According to a report by Your Money, 68% of local authorities will be unaffected by the changes in Stamp Duty coming into effect on April 1. However, first time buyers in 31% of local councils will see their Stamp Duty payments rise due to the higher value of properties in these areas. Four such London councils where first time buyers will be affected include Kingston, Wandsworth, Richmond and Hackney.

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A quick look at 2025 – and a busy first quarter

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According to the latest property market predictions from The Guardian, the start to 2025 is going to be busy, largely because of the changes in Stamp Duty which, as our quiz has shown, is going to lead a buying frenzy among first time buyers. Obviously the April 1 deadline is going to concentrate minds in areas where buyers will be affected by the change.

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With the continued imbalance between supply and demand, there will continue to be an upward pressure on house prices but, as usual, buyers will be looking for value for money. Which means that expert valuations remain as important as ever.

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For mortgage advisers – workflow management will be as important as ever

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With high levels of market activity, and the predictions of a succession of mortgage rate reductions, organisation is critical for mortgage advisers, not just in managing the wealth of competing rate offers emerging from mortgage lenders, but to ensure that the advice you give meets the FCA regulations around compliance and consumer duty.

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By investing in the Surecase mortgage adviser portal, we can bring a whole new level of workflow management to your business with a range of game-changing features that we’ve designed to help you overcome the time pressures created by the level of detail required to tick so many regulatory and client satisfaction boxes.

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Here’s how we’re changing the way mortgage advisers work:

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• Full integration with the Intelliiflo office platform for seamless transfer of data to Surecase
• A mortgage-specific Fact Find feature that enables swift, relevant and secure data input, with information saved for subsequent retrieval for future client applications 
• Caseload management prioritisation – Surecase identifies which client applications need your attention next.
• Seamless communication with your clients that funnels all your messaging into a single source – for quick and easy reference.
• Secure upload of client documentation, and downloadable files to evidence compliance
• Admin hierarchy enables you to delegate admin functions to other members of your team
• Access anywhere, any time
• E-signatures for swift and secure client approval – and faster application processing.

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“We’re really ambitious about what we want to achieve with Surecase. We know the pressures mortgage advisers are under to deliver high levels of professional and compliant advice to their customers. So the features that we’ve now developed are designed to be serious game changers – ultimately helping all of us regain valuable time, while equipping us with an essential tool that will enable us to work as efficiently as possible”. Simon Horsfall

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Grab yourself another mince pie and book a demo today.

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We hope you have a fantastic Christmas.

Now give yourself a free gift for the new year – a 45 minute demo. It’s quick and simple – just choose a time and date.

Looking to play your mortgage adviser ‘A game’ in 2025?

Then a free demo of the Surecase mortgage case management system could play a big part in setting you up for success.  Surecase co-founder Simon Horsfall explains how.

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When we first set up the Surecase mortgage adviser portal we actually thought the best way to road test the system was to give everyone a free 30 day trial.

But with so many new features added since its inception, the best way to understand how we can help you optimise your workflow efficiency is with a comprehensive product demo.

Which is how we’re introducing our game-changing mortgage advisers portal to industry professionals.

In 45 mins we’ll show you how we can dramatically improve your mortgage adviser workflow

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Through each demo, what we’re now showing mortgage advisers is the wealth of features that we’ve now developed to make Surecase your indispensable partner for every aspect of your mortgage case load.

Coming from professional mortgage adviser backgrounds, Surecase has always been designed to tackle the core challenges that can bring additional stresses to our daily work. These include:

• Managing an ever expanding portfolio of cases, all at different stages of development
• Staying on top of all your client communications –  coming at you from different sources (emails, SMS texts, WApp, phone calls)
• Keeping up to date with all your FCA Compliance
• Meeting the additional demands of FCA Consumer Duty Juggling client management with building your new client bank
• Keeping up to speed with the rapidly changing product offers in the mortgage marketplace
• Maintaining a healthy work-life balance

Now integrated with Intelliflo for rapid, accurate data input

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Speed, efficiency, accuracy and usability.

As we explain in all our demos, Surecase is a go anywhere, use anywhere portal for mortgage advisers who want complete control over their workflow.

Over the past six months we’ve introduced a raft of new features which are designed to dramatically improve the way you manage and prioritise your caseloads.

For starters, we’ve now integrated Surecase with the mainstream Intelliflo platform for seamless integration. This has always been a major development project which has now been universally rolled out in this latest dev iteration.

But more importantly, the end of this year will see our new mortgage adviser Fact Finder interfaced with IO which will allow you to:

• Populate client data fields without unnecessary repetition
• Save client data securely for future application
• Populate only the specific data fields relevant to the case

Because Fact Finding is the foundation to all successful and compliant financial advice, the Fact Find feature is a key part of our demo. What we want to show you here is the rigour behind its design, its speed of use and the intuitive way it knows the fields you need to use. Previously, with other financial services Fact Find systems there have been too many irrelevant data fields that get in the way of the real information that you need to collect. Our version really does speed up what can be a very time consuming data management task.

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Admin functions give you the freedom to delegate key tasks to other team members

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Another great feature of Surecase is the hierarchy of users that can be set up, which enables you to delegate certain tasks to your admin team who can work on progressing cases by uploading supporting documentation. This is great for when you want to spend time away from the office meeting new clients and ensuring you meet your consumer duty obligations by giving proper and appropriate advice.

And because the Surecase mortgage adviser system is encrypted, all your data is safely and securely stored – and always available for downloading to meet FCA compliance.

We can also show you how Surecase actively alerts you to the different development stages as each case progresses. We know from our own experience that, as you expand your base of mortgage applicants, staying on top of each one can be quite challenging, especially when you’re managing a constant flow of communications.

Another feature that is important to demonstrate is how Surecase can streamline all your client communications into a simple funnel that helps you follow a thread of conversation from a single source. This is a massive time saver as it saves you trying to contain the mass of messages that follow you through each case, from each client. And remember, these captured conversations are safely stored for client confidentiality and as additional supporting evidence for compliance.

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A no-worry transition from your current mortgage adviser CRM platform to Surecase

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Finally, what we also want to demonstrate is how we’ve created all the technical checks and balances to ensure a safe and secure transition from your current platform to Surecase. We know that using new technology, particularly one that will become your day to day partner, requires a leap of faith when so much valuable data is at stake. But we can reassure you that our stress test of the system, plus its verified use by mortgage advisers, will enable you to make the move to Surecase with confidence.

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Here’s what Chris Clegg, a Surecase user, has to say about the portal:

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“Surecase has been one of the easiest financial CRM systems I have used and now that Surecase allows me to sync my cases through my current IO platform it has managed to give me so much time back.”

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Now’s the time to see it for yourself. Set yourself up for greater success in 2025 by booking a demo today.  Just click on the link to choose a convenient time.

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https://www.binder.cloud/book-a-demo

Simon Horsfall explains how the latest development enhancements to the Surecase mortgage adviser portal are designed to improve workflow efficiency, and make direct communication with your mortgage clients even easier.

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Now that Surecase is becoming an established part of the mortgage adviser landscape, we’re at the stage where we want to enhance the user experience further.

As new interactions have worked their way through the development stages, we’ve taken a closer look at how we can bring even greater workflow efficiencies to your daily mortgage caseload management.

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The foundations of Surecase have been built on our simple belief that, as mortgage advisers, we need to be smarter with the way we spend our time. Working with colleagues in the industry we know that  some of the most time consuming aspects of our job are:

• Client communications – keeping up to speed with clients at different stages in their mortgage application process
• Caseload prioritisation – identifying which mortgage application really cases need your attention the most
• Fact Finding data input – populating all those data fields based on your detailed information capture from your client

So this is where we’ve directed the latest phase of user-experience enhancements.

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1. To do lists.

Every mortgage adviser needs a ‘to do’ list to stay on top of their day. Even if you take the ‘analogue’ old school approach and write lists in your notebook, a digital action list within the Surecase system can now make a big difference to your workflow efficiency.

The new ‘to do’ function has been designed to highlight the mortgage case loads that need your attention next – mainly because there’s been a new activity or progress that means they’re ready to be moved on. Or, you might also decide that, apart from the cases highlighted for your attention, that you want to select a cluster of client files to work on. Surecase now enables you to do this.

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2. Chat with clients while they’re active in their files.

This is a really smart enhancement that enables you to chat directly with your client when you’re in the Surecase portal and you can see that they’re active, for instance uploading documentation. The system now notifies you that the client is ‘online’ giving you the opportunity to grab their attention while they’re using the portal.

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3. Fact Find integration with Inteliflo

Because Intelliflo is such a mainstream platform within the mortgage and wider financial services industry, we know that the development of our mortgage-specific Fact Find features needs to interface with this system.

This year has seen significant investment in developing what we know from mortgage adviser networks is a real game changer – a Fact Finding feature that is tailored specifically for the questions and data fields that you need to populate from your information gathering process with your clients.

The Surecase portal is already integrated with Intelliflo but the key development this autumn will be to integrate the Fact Find feature.  This is where we want to achieve significant marginal gains for mortgage advisers by speeding up the time-consuming data population process – which can be lengthy. And sometimes frustrating.

At the moment, this is the one area where Surecase doesn’t automatically data-fill Fact Finding information. Once we’ve cracked this key point of integration we believe Surecase will deliver even more workflow efficiencies, particularly when combined with the other refinements that we’ve recently introduced.

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“Ultimately, we want to get to the stage where Surecase becomes a truly seamless part of our everyday mortgage processes. We know from user feedback that it’s already helping mortgage advisers save valuable time, but now we’re really working on these latest modifications to make Surecase a genuine market leader in terms of user experience and simplicity”. Simon Horsfall.

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Book your Surecase demo today

This autumn we’re doing a big push on client demos. Followed by a free 30 day trial. So get yourself organised for 2025 and see how Surecase can make a real difference.

Contact us today to book your initial demo.

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Simply email info@binder.cloud

While we’ve got your attention, let’s see where you might be losing valuable time.

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The chances are that you’re in holiday mode right now, and who can blame you. We all work hard for a well-earned break.

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So, we’ll keep our summer blog short and to the point, because we know that time is a precious commodity. And family time is important.

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As mortgage advisers, we’re all juggling so many different things – sourcing the best mortgage products, building our new business pipeline, keeping on top of admin, chasing documentation, making sure we’re FCA compliant, fulfilling our FCA consumer duty obligations  – and so on. But once your holiday is over,  how ready are you for optimum workflow efficiency when you head back to your desk?

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As mortgage advisers, we’re all juggling so many different things – sourcing the best mortgage products, building our new business pipeline, keeping on top of admin, chasing documentation, making sure we’re FCA compliant, fulfilling our FCA consumer duty obligations  – and so on. But once your holiday is over,  how ready are you for optimum workflow efficiency when you head back to your desk?

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Take the holiday quiz.

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(Btw, there are no wrong answers.)

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1. Ideally, we’d all like to work 9-5. But how many extra hours do you put in during a typical week?

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• 3-5 hours
• 6-12 hours
• Over 12 hours + weekends

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2.As a mortgage adviser, what is the biggest consumer of your work time?

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• Managing your admin
• Keeping on top of client communications
• Sourcing the best mortgage deals / keeping an eye on changing rates?
• Compliance paperwork
• Consumer duty obligations

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3. What do you see as the main obstacles to doing your job really well?

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• Time consuming data entry
• Not spending enough time with clients
• Always running out of time
• Not being able to focus on the things that matter?

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4. What do you find really rewarding about being a mortgage adviser?

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• Helping my clients get the home they’ve been looking for
• Giving top quality advice based on knowing all the facts
• Being professional in every way – compliant, efficient, dependable
• The financial rewards

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5. If you started to save time through workflow efficiency, what would you do with it?

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• Spend more time with my family
• Take up a new hobby
• Spend more time on my existing hobby
• Just get away from the laptop and be outdoors
• Study for more professional qualifications

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6. Which of the following statements reflects your view on Fact Finding?

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• It’s the foundation of all the advice I give
• It’s critical to helping me stay compliant
• It’s time consuming but you can’t move on to the next step without it
• I wish there was a Fact Finding system that was quicker to use, but just as thorough.

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7. How soon are you thinking about your next holiday?

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• I’ve booked it already
• I can’t wait for the next one
• I was too busy to have a holiday
• I’d prefer to carry on working

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That’s it. You’ve done it!

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The aim is to get you ton think about how you’re spending your time, and where you can save it. There are no wrong answers although we do hope that, like us, you wouldn’t prefer to carry on working 52 weeks a year, and that you found time for a well-deserved break.

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Time away from the computer is important, which is why we created Surecase – to help all of us achieve the right work-life balance while also enabling us to meet the various demands of our job, all of which we covered in questions 2, 3 and 4.

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The biggest challenge we all face, as mortgage advisers, is how to best use our time. Which is what this quiz is all about. Surecase was designed to achieve the following:

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• Improve your workflow efficiency
• Streamline your client communications through our Chat feature – no more juggling texts, emails, WApp messages and documenting phone calls
• Help you remain compliant by capturing every mortgage caseload journey
• Provide you with a secure portal for the download and safe storage of all client documentation
• Help you achieve your Consumer Duty obligations by enabling you to free up time to spend with clients
• Make sure you provide the best compliant advice based on a rigorous Fact Find.

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By delegating admin functions through Surecase, you can free up time to spend developing new business

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With the Surecase mortgage adviser CRM portal we’ve designed it so that you can give administrators access to help with your back-end admin (chasing and uploading documentation), allowing you to focus on new business and looking after clients.

Also, with so many rate changes and varying product offers, we know how time consuming this can be. Surecase helps you stay on top of all your admin by keeping all your documents safely stored in one place, for easy access.

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Discover our game-changing mortgage adviser CRM Fact Finding feature

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And it’s the last feature, and our most recent addition to Surecase, that is now coming online this autumn after a summer of trials and testing on real-live caseloads.

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The Surecase Fact Find is a real time saver because we’ve designed it to be intuitive, easy to populate with client data, and seamlessly integrated with existing mortgage adviser CRM systems like Intelliflo .

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As Surecase co-founder Simon explains:

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The new Surecase Fact Find feature is designed to be an industry game changer. The biggest challenge for mortgage advisers is that we’ve been using generic financial services Fact Finding systems that ask too many irrelevant questions, or have empty data fields that we have to navigate our way past to find the data fields we need.

Our approach has been to develop a system that is more intuitive, fast and more efficient to use, and one that remembers client data for future reference with remortgage applications or new mortgage quotes further down the line.

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Want to get back to the office and totally smash your workflow efficiency?

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Book a free demo, followed by a 30 day free trial.

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Just email info@binder.cloud and we’ll be in touch.

For UK independent mortgage advisers and mortgage adviser networks, compliance is a complex but critical aspect of their operations. It’s there to protect us as professionals, and it’s there to protect our clients. In this blog we explain how Surecase can help you with both compliance and document management.

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We all know the challenges that day to day work and compliance management bring to your job – particularly when you’re balancing new mortgage business, with managing your current portfolio of mortgage application clients.

In this recent FT Adviser article – Get your compliance right or face a crisis it explores how simple mistakes can easily lead you down a nightmare road towards non-compliance. For instance:

• Badly documented Fact Finding sessions with your client
• Taking the wrong attitude towards risk assessments
• A shortage of resources – human and technology
• Product suitability reports littered with standard paragraphs and unnecessary risk warnings that complicate client understanding

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Compliance support for mortgage advisers

As mortgage advisers ourselves, we know that compliance is woven through every part of our work, so we created Surecase – a mortgage adviser CRM portal that’s specifically designed to support you with as many aspects of compliance as possible. Compliance is both an internal process of business disciplines, as well as an external one where your work is monitored against an ever growing number of regulations, the most significant recent one being Consumer Duty.

With all this in mind, one of the key features that our latest development release is focusing on is that all-important Fact Find. It’s the essential foundation to understanding your clients’ wants, needs and financial circumstances from which you can provide professionally sound, and compliant advice.

As we’ve found from our daily practice and research, industry Fact Find portals are often just created for the broader financial services profession, rather than being mortgage and life cover specific. This often means that your Fact Finding sessions with your clients become bogged down wading through unnecessary sections of forms that bear no real significance on the real facts that mortgage advisers need to drill down into.

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Currently going through its Beta testing stage, the Surecase Fact Finding feature is designed to:

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• Intuitively guide you through the form filling process for speed and accuracy
• Pre-fill all your basic personal information to save time and avoid duplication
• Focus specifically on the mortgage and life cover needs of your clients
• Build a detailed picture of the financial and circumstantial profile of your clients
• Store and retain Fact Find information for future retrieval – essential for remortgage applications

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Fact Finding game changer for mortgage advisers

The Surecase Fact Finding feature is designed to be the game-changer that our sector of the financial service industry needs. Making it very specific to the mortgage adviser market means that Surecase users will have everything on their side to make mortgage and life cover recommendations that meet the needs of their clients, while significantly helping with compliance. Simon Horsfall, Surecase

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Aside from the Fact Finding feature, Surecase is already being used by mortgage advisers to help with:

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• Streamlining their workflow processes, particularly around prioritising caseloads.
• Managing client communications through a Chat feature that channels all messaging, texts and emails into a single point of contact
• Documentation – ID, bank statements, salary slips, application forms – can all be securely uploaded and stored.
• Storing/downloading the full history of every client application to evidence compliance and consumer duty

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One of the other key features of Surecase is that it can interface with other industry CRM portals such as Intelliflo, enabling you to download all your existing files into the Surecase portal.

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A mortgage adviser portal that saves you time

‍Here’s what Surecase convert Jake Smith, an independent mortgage adviser, says about his experience of our portal:‍

I’ve been using Surecase for at least 2 years and have found that it has saved me a lot of time and made me more efficient. All communication and document collecting used to be done over email – but I found that, too often, I would either forget to save the documents, or a new email thread would start and the old one would be lost. Surecase has resolved these issues as clients can upload all their documents to Surecase where they’re stored until I need them. And the “Chat” function means I can communicate instantly with my clients – and have these communications stored for me to refer back to.

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Looking to find a mortgage adviser CRM system that can proactively help you with compliance, and make your workflow more efficient?

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See the Surecase difference for yourself by arranging a free demo.

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Simply email hello@binder.cloud to book an appointment.

Dan Rathbone, Head of Development at Surecase, explains how its CRM mortgage adviser portal is designed to reduce the stresses caused by the complexities of your role.

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Whether you’ve been a mortgage adviser for some time, or just been in the industry for a while, you’ll know that the job you’re trained to do has, in many respects, become more complex. Increased regulatory compliance, the additional layers of responsibility created by consumer duty and the vast array of mortgage product offers, means that you’re not only spinning many different plates, but operating in an environment where you need to evidence that you’re doing the right thing – and offering the best advice possible.

One of the consequences of all this is that mortgage advisers are in short supply. It’s a tougher profession to qualify for, and has become significantly demanding once you’re in it.

So, you’re an important asset, but an increasingly scarce commodity, as this recent mortgage industry blog explains.

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The other issue affecting the industry is the significant role that technology plays in every aspect of a mortgage adviser or mortgage broker’s daily lives. For the older generation, who came through the industry with a pen and paper, the sheer volume of technology that advisers now have to get their head around is potentially mind-boggling.

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But, as this 2022 survey by Smart 365 found out, 61% of mortgage professionals believe technology is now integral to the future of the industry, with 56% saying that the biggest advantage of tech is that it saves them time.

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“Speed and efficiency are particularly important in this high interest rate environment” reveals the survey.

Which is reassuring, as that’s precisely what Surecase is all about. Being a mortgage adviser is a rewarding career option (in every sense) but we want to make it a less stressful one too.

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Simplify the complexities of your day-to-day mortgage adviser job

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Surecase was actually conceived before the current shortage became so apparent, but one of the core motives behind the design of the Surecase mortgage adviser CRM portal was to simplify the daily and weekly workload of mortgage advisers. The issues we wanted to tackle were the:

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• Long hours spent keeping on top of admin tasks
• Distractions of those all-important client communications
• Stresses caused by evidencing compliance
• Additional responsibilities created by consumer duty
• Impact on work-life balance of inefficient workflow practices
• Complexities caused by increasing use of technology

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It might seem ironic to want to tackle the complexities of a tech-driven industry with another piece of technology but, as I’ve stressed already, the key driver behind every aspect of Surecase is simplicity.

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An easy to use mortgage adviser CRM system that now integrates with Intelliflo 

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One of our key objectives in developing Surecase was that it had to have an interface with Intelliflo, the industry standard platform used by financial services and mortgage adviser professionals.

But with Surecase, the game changing feature that we’ve introduced is that you can seamlessly migrate all current client files across and use the Surecase portal to input all your client information.

The key feature here is that Surecase only presents you with fields applicable to a mortgage adviser. You’re not wading through unnecessary pages of blank data fields. This is where significant time is saved through the avoidance of unnecessary duplication.

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Collecting and retrieving client documentation is easy – and helps with mortgage adviser compliance

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We want to speed things up. To use a sporting analogy, Surecase is about helping you achieve marginal gains. Saving 20 minutes here and there with different processes soon becomes an hour or two at the end of the day, and 8-10 hours by the end of the week.

As you’ll see from our features page, the Client Portal area is where you can simply tick a few boxes to request all the supporting documentation (payslips, bank statements, proof of ID) that you need from your clients. These documents are also encrypted and securely stored on our system to ensure complete compliance with confidentiality and GDPR.

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Case management – retrieve all your clients’ case notes by ticking a few boxes

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We know from our own experience that case management is another area where hours can be lost retrieving client data, either to progress a mortgage application further or to check on an existing client’s mortgage and insurance products. Surecase is specifically designed to make retrieval simple and quick. And, of course, by having them securely stored on the portal you can also download them for compliance at any time.

Streamline your mortgage adviser client communications

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The Live Chat feature on Surecase is another example of where we’re using technology to reduce the stresses caused by communications. One of the challenges facing today’s mortgage advice professionals is the array of communication channels that they have to cope with from every one of their clients:  texts, email messages, WApp, Messenger, even the good old fashioned letter. Left uncontrolled they can become a massive distraction.

With Live Chat on Surecase we’ve created an easy-to-use live feed with your clients that means you don’t have to use various comms channels, which then need to be stored and documented. By chatting in real time with your clients, all your communications are securely stored alongside each of your clients case notes – so they form part of an integrated file containing every piece of dialogue. And every time you send them a message, they get an immediate notification.

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Mortgage application fact finding made simpler, quicker and more thorough

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This is our latest feature, one that we’ve invested huge amounts of time in developing. Why? Because we know that fact finding is the foundation of every successful mortgage and life cover application.

Compliance. Consumer Duty. Best practice. Achieving all these elements of your job requires a rigorous fact find. But, as we found out, no current system is truly bespoke to the mortgage adviser industry.

So we’ve developed a mortgage-specific Fact Find solution that avoids time-wasting duplication of data. Not only that, but your client information is securely stored for when you need to revisit it for a remortgage deal, new mortgage or change in mortgage protection. As with all data stored on Surecase, it’s securely encrypted for complete peace of mind.

Plus, this is another key piece of supporting documentation that can be downloaded as evidence of compliance.

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Chris Clegg, a recent convert to Surecase, had this to say about the portal:

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“Surecase has been one of the easiest financial CRM systems I have used and now that Surecase allows me to sync my cases through my current IO platform it has managed to give me so much time back”.

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Book a demo to see how Surecase makes things simpler, and more efficient.

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Email info@Surecase.cloud to arrange a demo. Then try it FREE for 30 days.

With more and more people putting the Surecase mortgage adviser CRM portal through its paces with our FREE 30 day trial, we talk through some of the best ways to give the system a proper road test.

The reason we set up the Surecase mortgage adviser CRM portal was to make all our working lives easier. Working in a highly regulated industry such as ours creates a unique set of daily pressures, not least ensuring that we’re being compliant within the guidelines set by the Financial Conduct Authority, and also to ensure that we are now meeting the additional requirements of consumer duty – another layer of client due diligence set out by FCA since 2023.

Time is a valuable resource, and it’s one that can be rapidly eroded by the following additional pressures:

• Spend more time with your family
• Spend more time submitting business and building our client bank.

How you want to spend your spare time is up to you, but our top tip is to make sure you use Surecase as much as you can on a daily basis throughout the trial period, so you can see how it can transform your working week.

• Achieve greater workflow efficiency – only work on the cases that really need your attention
• Delegate background admin to non client-facing admin staff
• Take control of all your client communications from a multitude of different sources into one easy-to-manage single channel

As mortgage advisers ourselves, our ambition for Surecase was to reduce the daily hassles that turn 9am-5pm days into 8am-9pm days, and see too many of us playing catch up on admin and compliance. We also wanted to free up time so that we could either:

• Keeping up to speed with a constant stream of client communications
• Creating an audit trail of supporting documentation for mortgage applications
• Juggling competing priorities from a constantly changing list of clients
• Keeping on top of all your FCA compliance evidence.

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‍Here’s how to migrate your client data over to Surecase

Firstly, Surecase has a seamless interface with Intelliflo, one of the largest professional platforms that manages many professional advisers’ CRM data management. So, if you’re migrating your client data over to Surecase, this is an easy-to-do process and because of the security and encryption embedded in our system; there’s no risk of your client confidentiality being compromised.

You’ll also notice how we’ve created data fields that are just specific to mortgage advisers, which means you don’t have to skip through irrelevant sections or pages. Not only does it mean less data entry, but the system is faster and more responsive than larger platforms which are having to manage vast amounts of data.

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‍Choose a sample of live cases to work on

Don’t migrate all your cases across, but choose a good ‘active’ handful that are at various stages of progression. By doing it this way, you can see how Surecase helps you move through the full life-cycle of an application.

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Make full use of the ‘Chat’ function

This is one of several game-changers that we’ve designed into the system. Essentially, it amalgamates all your client communications into a single ‘funnel’, which means you’re not trying to grapple with a myriad of conversations from emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, and other sources.

Feedback from clients has shown that this is a really effective and simple feature for them to use too. And the great thing is that it’s also fully secure, especially when it comes to uploading supporting documentation such as ID, bank statements and payslips.

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‍Delegate with Surecase’s admin access feature

Surecase is designed to free up all those lost hours spent on time-consuming admin. So get into the habit of using our Organisation Management feature which enables you to define who can do and see what. By delegating access, you can assign specific tasks to other members of your team so that they can focus on data management, while you focus on client-facing consumer duty and new business development.

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What happens at the end of my 30 day trial?

You can still retain all the files that you’ve been working on, for an unlimited period of time allowing you to carry on working on your Surecase caseload. You can safely download your ‘work in progress’ files for your records, and compliance at any time.

User feedback is really important to us so, we’d really like to hear how you went on, and how the whole experience was for you. And if you want to continue, we can support you through the full on-boarding process.

If you need any technical support during your trial, simply email support@binder.cloud at any time.

Remember, Surecase is currently just £50 pcm per user, with no limit on the number of cases.

Here’s what Chris Clegg, Mortgage Adviser and a recent convert to Surecase, says about it.

“Surecase has been one of the easiest financial CRM systems I have used and now that Surecase allows me to sync through my current IO platform it has managed to give me so much time back.”

You can also read his blog here.

If you’d like to sign up for our FREE 30 day trial click here.

Mortgage Adviser, Chris Clegg, is a convert to Surecase. Here he talks us through some of its features, which have helped free up time to develop his new business pipeline.

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“As a mortgage adviser, mortgage broker or independent financial adviser, the biggest challenges we face is managing our time with the competing pressures of compliance, the new Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulations around consumer duty, and staying on top of communications with our clients.

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“As one of the early adopters of the new Surecase CRM portal, I was curious to see how it could really save me time. As any mortgage adviser will tell you, one of the biggest elements of our work is ensuring that you’ve accumulated all the evidence to prove that you are being compliant. And with the 2023 FCA regulations around consumer duty placing an even greater emphasis on evidence, having a system that keeps you on track as you go along is worth its weight in gold.”

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“This recent article in The Intermediary shows just how onerous consumer duty has become for underwriting mortgage offers, which is where Surecase’s ability to assimilate all your evidence into downloadable case files really comes into its own.

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Surecase is a purpose-built CRM system specifically for mortgage advisers

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“The first, and most obvious feature about Surecase, is that it is designed by mortgage advisers for mortgage advisers. Having used a larger CRM platform, one of the key issues that slowed me down was the duplication of data onto a system not specifically tailored to the unique user needs of mortgage applicants.

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“The latest Beta version of Surecase is now linked with the Intelliflo interface, which is where a significant proportion of financial services networks manage their CRM data. This is a game-changing development as it enables us to deploy Surecase within an industry standard platform that we’re already familiar with but reap the benefits of using a tailor-made portal.

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“Having all the specific fields designed for my user experience (rather than a generic system) means that data entry is now much quicker, and the system itself is more responsive. Basically, I’m not clicking my way through pages of empty data fields that aren’t relevant to mortgage applications.”

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Average time saved in a week: 5 hours

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Different admin access levels means other members of my team can update client files

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“Even before the arrival of consumer duty, it was critical for me to spend valuable time with clients to understand their needs and financial circumstances, and to be able to scan the market for the best offers available. During a busy year like 2023, when the constant change in mortgage rates led to continuous alterations in offers from mortgage lenders, the time pressures placed on mortgage advisers like me were considerable.

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“As an administrator on the Surecase portal I can define who in my team has which level of access to my client files. This means they can help me progress each case without my direct involvement. This is a real game changer as it really does free up so much time. And because Surecase notifies me of the changes in status to an application, it’s easy for me to manage my workflow better – I can see which cases are progressing smoothly, and which ones need more of my attention, or the attention of my team.”

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Average time saved in a week: 2-3 hours

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A smarter way to manage communications with your mortgage clients

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“During the lifetime of a mortgage application there are reams of conversations, from many different sources – emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, formal letters of acceptance – plus all the various exchanges of documentation such as bank statements and payslips.

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“The Surecase chat function has, arguably, made the biggest difference because it brings all my client communications together in one place. But not only that, it stores them securely so that I can evidence:

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• the conversations I’ve had around mortgage offers
• the rate comparison data that I’ve sourced from mortgage lenders
• the progression of a mortgage application case – from initial enquiry to completion.

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“Again, in terms of consumer duty, this is a great tool for capturing all the back and forth communication between me and my clients. Importantly, I’ve had feedback from my clients to say that they feel safe and comfortable using it.”

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Average time saved per week: 2-3 hours.

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Reinvesting saved time to spend on new business development

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“Long hours at the laptop, mean less time with clients – and less time developing my new mortgage business pipeline. The great thing with Surecase is that I can access it anywhere, and its alert notifications mean I can see where I’m up to with each of my cases, wherever I am.

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“As with any new system it takes a few weeks to fully get into the swing of how it works but the 30 day free trial means you can really put it through its paces. Surecase was actually much easier to use than I was expecting – and  now that I’ve been using it constantly I can really appreciate the way it’s starting to change my work, through:

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• Improved workflow efficiency – there’s a much more linear progression to my workflow.
• Enhanced work delegation – I know which parts of my admin I can ‘subcontract’ to my team.
• Smoother communications with my clients – because they’re all channelled through the chat function my mind feels ‘tidier’.

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“All of the above means I can now spend more time developing a stream of new clients. Ultimately, I feel like I can trust Surecase to keep me on the right side of mortgage compliance at every stage of each application. Documents can be safely and securely uploaded and stored, and I can download client files at any time in preparation for evidence of compliance.

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“Surecase has been one of the easiest financial CRM systems I have used and now that Surecase allows me to sync my cases through my current IO platform it has managed to give me so much time back.”

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To see how Surecase can help you change your work life and save you valuable time, sign up for a 30 day trial.  Watch a quick demo here.

Simon Horsfall, co-founder, explains how the Surecase mortgage adviser CRM portal can help you fulfil your consumer duty obligations under new FCA rules. 

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When the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) introduced the new Consumer Duty regulations on 23 July of last year, it placed even greater onus on mortgage advisers, mortgage brokers and other financial services providers to ensure that they’re achieving the best possible outcomes for their customers.

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The significant aspect of these regulations is that the FCA expects firms “to make sure, and be able to show us, that they’re acting to deliver good customer outcomes.”

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In its Consumer Duty guidance, the FCA highlights the four outcomes which they regard as representing the key elements of the relationship between a firm and its customers. These are:

• The governance of products and services
• Price and value
• Consumer understanding
• Consumer support

In practice, this means putting customers at the heart of their business, by providing products and services that meet their customers’ needs, and offer fair value.

And, perhaps, most importantly, communicate and engage with customers and engage with them so that they can make effective, timely and properly-informed decisions.

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How can I complete all my mortgage admin and meet the Consumer Duty obligations?

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As mortgage advisers ourselves, we know that one of the biggest challenges facing all industry professionals is the shortage of time. Face to face client meetings, coupled with ensuring you have the latest mortgage offers to hand, plus mountain-loads of mortgage compliance admin, can lead to a sense of being overwhelmed – and 9-5 working days stretching with early starts and late finishes.  With the FCA placing a big emphasis on the ability to evidence customer care, the Surecase mortgage adviser CRM system comes into its own in several ways.

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Save time chasing a never ending stream of emails, texts and WApp messages

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We know this is a major headache. Multiple messages coming from multiple sources, from multiple clients. Because tracking and maintaining them eats into your working day, our Live Chat function provides a single portal for all your client communications. And in terms of supporting consumer duty, these can all be downloaded into a single document file at any time.

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Let your admin staff complete admin-related work

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With our admin functions, Surecase allows you to give tiered access to your portal to different people in your organisation, so that admin tasks such as chasing documentation can be undertaken, uploaded and securely stored, by non-client-facing members of your team. Again, this frees up time for you to focus on quality time with your client, and also in searching for the best products, deals and offers to meet the individual needs of each customer.

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Surecase brings all your client communications together through ‘Live Chat’

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As we’ve explained earlier, the FCA’s approach to consumer duty is that it expects to see hard evidence that customer care, fact finding and due diligence around providing clients with the advice to meet their needs, is available for them to see. Again, this brings us back to the vicious circle of mortgage advisers juggling with the competing demands of managing communications from so many different sources – WhatsApp messages, texts, emails, even hand-written correspondence.

With Surecase’s Live Chat feature, all your client communications are captured securely on the portal and can be downloaded at the closure of the case for use as an audit trail of all your conversations.

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Free up time to offer your clients wider advice on protection

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As we know, mortgage advice is only part of the picture. One of the other big challenges of our job is finding the time to offer clients a range of all-important protection advice too. Sourcing the range of products on offer for life, income and critical illness cover is time consuming and, with regard to Consumer Duty, you need to be able to evidence due diligence around fact finding and offering the right solution.

For company directors and managers, having a CRM system that frees up time to ensure your advisers have sufficient research and client time to be rigorous in their advice, is a major advantage. This is where the admin functions play a key role in enabling mortgage advisers to focus on client-facing conversations, while other members of your team can use Surecase to manage the flow of documentation and admin checks.

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Another time-saving feature – Surecase integration with Intelliflo

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Data input is another area where time is lost due to navigating your way around information systems to ensure all the necessary application information is correct.

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Currently in its Beta testing phase, we’re now finalising our integration with the Intelliflo interface – one of the largest sales and information management platforms used by financial services professionals.

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Integration with Intelliflo (IO) will mean that Surecase users will longer need to double key their IO data entries. By uploading and synchronising its data in IO, Surecase users will be able to work through caseloads even more efficiently and quickly. The result will be a seamless migration of data into the key fields that matter to mortgage advisers.

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“Surecase is all about resolving what we see as the two major challenges facing mortgage advisers: saving time and improving workflow efficiency. The FCA’s new focus on consumer duty simply makes the case for being more efficient, and timely in the preparation of supporting evidence, even more compelling.

Perhaps the most important feature of Surecase is its simplicity. We’ve designed it as an access anywhere, anytime, mortgage adviser CRM portal that does much of the workflow thinking for you.” Simon Horsfall.

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Time for quality advice leads to greater organisational profitability

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Quality not quantity. Ultimately, everything we’re aiming to do is to empower mortgage advisers and financial service companies to be as efficient as possible in the way they look after each and every one of their clients.

Each of the features we have designed is aimed at creating a series of significant marginal gains that, cumulatively, free up sizeable chunks of time to focus on the quality of customer service or, in the FCA’s words, “consumer duty”. More quality business with mortgage offers wrapped around protection, means more organisational profit – and also a genuine sense of having undertaken a professional, fully rounded job.

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Why not see how Surecase can help you change your workflow efficiency. Sign up for your free 30 day trial and see how it can make a real difference to the way you work, and frees up time to spend developing your new client bank.

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Sign up for your free trial