With Open Banking now available, don't give the lenders a reason not to lend.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about new technology, especially regarding the new ‘open banking’ opportunities and how your private transactions will come under scrutiny by lenders decision making computers, after you’ve given permission of course!

The idea is that the lender can review your incomes, outgoings and all other financial items just from delving in to your account, via open banking.  Big brother indeed.  The aim is to speed up the financial transaction and allow institutions to access your data at the touch of a button, as well as providing more competition and innovation to financial services.

The downside is that whatever is in your bank statements, lenders must take it into account when deciding whether to lend to you, or not.  There’s no hiding and now no apparent limit on time to be reviewed.  Currently lenders tend to look at just the last 3 months bank statements, but with open banking data at their fingertips, this could be unlimited moving forward.

With this in mind and so many recent rate and criteria changes, lenders will look closely at an individual’s recent payment profile, how many recent credit searches have been incurred by financial institutions and more.  Don’t give them any excuses not to lend to you!  The more credit searches you have on your profile, over a recent amount of time, the more likely your credit score will be lower as a result.  Try and ensure there’s no missed or late payments as these will also decrease your credit score.  In short, your credit search/score are the basis on which most lenders will initially decide whether to lend to you or not.  The best rates will almost definitely go to those with the best credit scores.  

Finally, so you’ve done all the hard work and gone through the whole mortgage process with the lender providing you with a mortgage offer and you can now sit back and relax.  Wrong!  Although the ‘binding’ mortgage offer has been issued, until you have completed on your new mortgage, the lender can still decline to proceed with their offering.  If you take out any finance, have lots of credit searches done or miss any payments after the mortgage offer has been issued and before completion, it could be that the lender will re-credit score you before completion, especially with the now easily available open banking access, and uncover something that might not be to their liking or mortgage conditions.  Always seek professional advice.