Playbook, mortgage broker
An estate agency wants to know how the firm holds a client's paperwork
The form does not usually come from a client. It comes from an estate agency, a housebuilder or another professional deciding whether to keep sending people, and behind the questions is a commercial relationship both sides want to continue. That is why it gets answered at all. What makes it uncomfortable to answer is what a broker holds: payslips, bank statements and identity documents for an entire household, assembled in one place, which is a more complete financial picture than most of the firms sending the form hold themselves.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for security questionnaires holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The sender is a referral partner rather than a customer, so the questions arrive with a commercial decision behind them, and a slow or vague answer costs the firm a source of cases rather than a single client.
- What the firm holds is an unusually complete picture of a household's finances gathered into one file, which is why the questions about storage and access come back harder here than at most professional firms.
- Data leaves the firm by design rather than by accident, going to lenders, to valuers and sometimes to insurers, so the honest answer to a sharing question is not no and the material has to be written for that.
- A good part of the form is really about the referral arrangement itself, what passes between the two firms and what is disclosed to the client about it, which is a compliance answer rather than a technical one.
How it arrives
- can you complete our introducer due diligence form
- where do you store applicant bank statements
- who else sees the documents we send over
- do you keep client information outside your own systems
- we need this back before we refer anyone else
- what happens to a file when a case does not proceed
What has to be indexed for this to work
| A standing pack you send before anybody asks | The answers you give every time, in one maintained document with a date on it. Firms that assemble this once stop rewriting the same replies, and the assistant has something specific to hand over rather than a promise that somebody will be in touch. |
|---|---|
| Where applicant documents go once they reach you | Which parties receive what, at which stage, and what leaves the firm as a matter of course. This is the section that gets read properly, because a household's statements travelling is the thing the introducer is being asked to stand behind. |
| How long you keep a file, by outcome | Completed, declined, withdrawn and never proceeded, since the periods differ and the question about the case that went nowhere is asked more often than the one about a completed case. |
| Who signs a form, and what the assistant hands over | The named person, and the fact that nothing is answered or returned without them. Publish it so the assistant routes confidently rather than attempting to be helpful about a control question. |
The reply
We keep a standing pack for exactly this and can send it over. It covers where applicant documents are held, who receives what during a case, and how long files are kept depending on whether a case completed, was declined or never went ahead [1]. Documents do leave us during an application, because lenders and valuers need them, and the pack sets out what goes where [2]. I cannot complete a form or answer anything that is not in the pack. Leave a name, an email and the deadline you are working to and it will go to the person who signs these off.
It offers the document in the first line, because an introducer chasing a form wants the form dealt with rather than a description of the firm's diligence. Admitting that data leaves is stronger than hedging, since the questionnaire exists to find that out and evasion reads as a finding. Asking for the deadline is practical, as these arrive with dates attached and are usually late by the time somebody asks.
Where it stops
The trigger. The sender attaches a form, asks a specific control question the published pack does not answer, or asks for a signature, a warranty or a contractual commitment.
I can send our standing pack, but I cannot complete a form, sign anything or answer a question that is not in it. Leave a name, an email and your deadline and it will reach the person who handles these.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never answer a control question about how anything is held or protected unless that exact answer is in the published pack, since a wrong answer here becomes a finding in somebody's file.
- Never complete, sign or return a form, and never say one has been dealt with, because the assistant can do none of those things.
- Never describe how a lender or a valuer handles data once it reaches them, which is theirs to describe and not the firm's to warrant.
- Never take a lending or affordability question inside a due diligence exchange, because the form is about the firm and the answer would be a view on an applicant nobody here has seen.
Questions
- Can it fill in the introducer's form for us?
- No. It reads what you have given it and answers from it with citations. It cannot open an attachment, write into a document or return one. What it does is get the standing pack in front of the sender the same day rather than a week later.
- Is publishing where applicant documents go a risk in itself?
- It is the ordinary content of one of these packs and the sender is going to ask for it anyway. What is genuinely risky is an assistant improvising an answer about storage, which is why the material should be a written pack rather than a set of reassuring sentences.
- Most of these come in from the same handful of agencies. Does that change anything?
- It makes the standing pack worth writing properly, because the same questions arrive from the same places every renewal. It also means the routing matters more than the answer, since these senders expect a named person and notice when they do not get one.
Keep reading
- Everything for a mortgage brokerProcess, documents and fees are safe to automate. Rates go stale fast and affordability cannot be answered generically.
- Handling security questionnaires in generalA buyer-side question arriving in the wrong place. Answer only what you publish, and never let an assistant improvise a claim you then own.
- The cover a lender insists on, and the cover that is a second appointmentBuildings cover is a lender condition with a deadline. Life cover is a separate regulated sale. Neither gets advised on in a chat window.
- Money paid on a mortgage case that went nowhereA down valuation, a decline or a collapsed chain. Whether money comes back depends which fee it was and whether the firm ever held it.
- The upload link has stopped working and the case is waiting on itExpired upload links, joint applicants sharing one login, and a portal that holds what was sent rather than what the lender has decided.
Try it on your own material
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