Catch up on the latest Sapphire news at Bluestone Mortgages

New technology alert – the Bluesky pilot has arrived!

You will all now have access to Bluesky, our new mortgage originations platform, which provides greater levels of automation, streamlined processing and reduced application to offer timescales. Whilst Bluesky is still in its infancy, we have aggressive plans to upgrade the system throughout 2023. Your feedback will be invaluable in helping our new digital platform become recognised as the gold standard in the Specialist Lending sector.

If you haven’t used Bluesky yet, here are some of the key benefits it will give you;

Automated credit reports

We’ve reformed the broker portal technology so that you can get a credit decision from Experian earlier in the application process.

Committed expenditure automation

Bluesky will save you time when keying in an application by pulling through your client’s committed expenditure. You just need to tick the box if the debt is being repaid.

Reduced document requirement

Enhanced data capture fields remove the need for certain documents, and our open banking integration removes the need for physical bank statements, saving you time.

Free valuation proposition – exclusively for you!

In other news, we are conscious that we haven’t launched any new Sapphire exclusives of late. So whilst we work on that, we recently introduced one free valuation on all newly submitted residential mortgage applications, including purchases. Not only that, we’ll also be instructing the valuation on receipt of a fully packaged case which will of course improve our application to offer times on your cases even further, which leads us nicely in to our next update.

We’re not talking weeks. We’re talking 9 days!

Our fully packaged application to offer turnaround times have reduced significantly over the past 3 months from 23 days in December, down to 9 days in March on all Sapphire Club cases. This is on average, 4 days quicker than the wider business and no doubt helped by the introduction of Bluesky along with a free Day 1 instructed valuation. In addition, in those cases where open banking has been utilised, our average application to offer times sit at just 4 working days. If you haven’t submitted an application with us recently then now would be a great time to see this for yourself. 

Criteria enhancements and our plans for 2023

Naturally, market volatility in recent months has meant making enhancements to lending criteria more of a challenge than it would usually be. However, we have been working hard of late to deliver improvements and I’m pleased to announce the following changes are now live:

• Removal of £18,000 minimum income (Please speak to your KAM / BDM prior to submission) 
• Temp / Agency / Zero Hours – Now just require a 12 month track record and in role for 3 months (no gaps of more than 6 weeks in the last 12 months) 
• Fixed term day rate & PAYE contractors now only need 6 months industry experience (no gaps of more than 6 weeks in the last 6 months) 
• Evidence of foster care income reduced from 24 to 12 months. 

We hope to announce further changes in due course including a new Sapphire exclusive. In addition, we will shortly be making improvements to our affordability calculator, ensuring we are able to lend more to those who need it most in these challenging times.

If you would like more updates…

On a final note of gratitude, we appreciate you taking the time to read this update today and we’ll be in touch again soon when we have further news to share. Our door is always open for any suggestions on how we can improve both on our proposition and our service to you so please do feel free to get in touch should you have any ideas.