Darlington Building Society has continued its digital investment with Iress by launching a mortgage platform with the aim of enhancing intermediaries’ experience.

Darlington Mortgage Hub is powered by Iress technology, MSO, and streamlines straightforward elements of more complex mortgage applications to speed up the overall process.

A team of underwriters will manually review complicated aspects to ensure that applications are not dismissed simply for being too complex.

The platform will be combined with automatic data processing (ADP) technology from financial technology and data specialist LendingMetrics.

This will enable the society to tap into intelligent decision-making technology, with the aim of speeding up the process and supporting its focus on customer service.

Andrew Craddock, chief executive of Darlington, said: “This is a major investment for Darlington Building Society.

“We’re thrilled to be the first building society outside of the top-10 to implement this level of technology into our mortgage process.

“Our aim was to improve the efficiency of the mortgage journey for brokers, which I am confident we will achieve with Darlington Mortgage Hub.

“Iress will enable us to sustainably increase our mortgage volume without inflating operating costs and has ultimately streamlined the experience from a broker’s perspective.

“It was a real team effort between the Society and the change team to deliver this project, and I encourage brokers to explore the new platform for themselves.”

“Darlington Mortgage Hub streamlines the straightforward elements of a mortgage journey, allowing our manual underwriters more resource to make to make informed decisions at pace where needed.

“This means that more complex cases are dealt with more efficiently whilst the overall mortgage journey accelerated.”

Andrew Simon, executive general manager of lending at Iress, added: “We’re immensely proud of the work Darlington and Iress have done over the last several months given the difficulties we’ve all faced.

“Now that the platform is implemented and up and running, we’re looking forward to seeing Darlington realise the benefits of a truly integrated mortgage sales and origination platform.

“Darlington’s implementation of this technology to power their digital transformation is evidence of our underlying product design and technology platform that allows such technology to be deployed across a wide range of lenders.”