“These are just small little things that you need to be aware of, and you need to be one step ahead of,” he said. “So you know that you are giving solid, good advice to your client.”
Manual underwriting: more work for brokers, better outcomes for clients
Many of Fazal’s clients fall at the first hurdle not because they’re poor risks, but because the system isn’t built around their profile.
With only a year or so in the country, their UK footprint is minimal and automated scorecards quickly shut them out. As he puts it, because many foreign nationals have only been in the UK for 12–18 months, “what is really going to come up from the last six years? Nothing.” As a result, they “fail to meet the internal credit scoring systems” of many lenders – and that’s often when the broker walks away rather than push further.
He’s sympathetic: advisers are under pressure, and a failed score often means extra work – appealing to an underwriter, assembling more context, and spelling out the story behind the case – which some are reluctant to take on. Yet for brokers who really know their panel, this doesn’t have to be the end of the road. Those with a handle on which lenders are open to manual underwriting can route cases straight to an underwriter for a human assessment instead of relying on the system alone.
In practice, that can add a couple of days to secure a decision in principle, and it does require managing expectations – being upfront with the client that their process will look and feel slightly different. But once that manually assessed DIP is in place, Fazal’s view is that the hard part is over: at that point, purchasing can begin in earnest, and the broker’s focus shifts to pulling together the right documents to turn an agreed‑in‑principle decision into a full mortgage offer.