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In this guide
Completing the Form
The form itself is relatively straight forwards and you should complete it naturally as you would any other form. However it’s worth keeping a few things in mind.
The form is split into 6 sections:
1. About the Loan
2. About the Property
3. About the Applicant
4. About the Applicant's Income
Select any income types your client has and you will see the available income fields you can complete.
5. About the Applicant's Debts
Select any types of debt your client has and you will be able to document the clients situation.
6. About the Applicants Expenditure
Complete any mandatory fields (required) and any optional expenditure items the customer has. Many lenders will ignore these fields as they use ONS data but this is not the case for all lenders so completing these will ensure the greatest level of accuracy.
How We Use Your Inputs
Some lenders' own calculators are very short and seem simple, whilst others are a lot more detailed. Our form is simple to complete but is designed to allow you to accurately capture your clients situation in detail.
This has two benefits. Firstly, its enables us to complete the vast majority of lenders calculators to a very high level of accuracy. Secondly, it allows us to work with lenders and capture only the incomes that they accept and ignore the ones they don’t which is often unclear when completing the lenders own calculators.
Please note: There are a couple of things to keep in mind.
Introducing 'Assumptions' and 'Ignored' Fields
Whilst our form is detailed we cannot possibly catch every unique question a lender asks. For example, if a lender asks if your customer banks with them we won’t have that question on our form. In this scenario we will make an ‘Assumption’ and take a best guess at the answer - in this case we would assume ‘No’.
Due to the level of detail we capture on our form there are times when there is simply nowhere on a lenders form to pass the information to. For example, we ask you to complete if it's a ‘Purchase or Remortgage’ but if the lender does not ask this then we simply cannot pass it through and the lender essentially ignores that fact. We call these ‘Ignored Fields’.
Don’t worry we’ll tell you when we’ve made an assumption and what fields the lender has effectively ignored in the results section. We’ll revisit Assumptions and Ignored fields in the ‘Understanding the results’ tutorial.
The most important thing to remember is that the accuracy of the results returned from lenders is dependent upon the level of detail you input to this form.
Top tips:
Check if the income field is MONTHLY or ANNUALLY
The more you complete the greater the accuracy of results
Make sure you include joint dependents against only one applicant
If you don’t know the postcode use one nearby
Selecting Your Lenders
Now that I’ve completed the form in step one I’m going to select which lenders I want to run affordability against. If you have a panel of lenders you will see two options to choose from Network Panel & All Lenders.
Here we have selected all lenders from the ‘All Lenders’ list. Once you’re done, click next to move to step 3.
Excluded Lenders
Once you have completed step 1, ‘The Form’ and step 2, ‘Selecting Lenders’ we are able to run a check to see if there are any potential issues that could prevent a lender from returning a loan amount. For example, you requested a term of 38 years in step 1 but the maximum you can select on a lenders calculator is 35, therefore it’s possible you will be unable to proceed with that lender.
There are three types of warnings that could appear on the platform. The first two are based on the information we have learned about the lender’s calculator.
We analyse each lender’s form and aim to replicate their own validation checks into our platform.
Warning One: Hard Exceptions
Sometimes a lender will not allow us to make a selection, for example, a dropdown for a mortgage term that only allows us to select a maximum of 35 and therefore if you have chosen a term of 40 we physically cannot enter this value.
Warning Two: Soft Exceptions
Sometimes a lender will allow us to input a figure to a field, for example, 40 in the mortgage term box but when you click calculate it gives you a validation error that the maximum term is 35. For these instances, we still send and input 40 but we expect this to fail.
Warning Three: Criteria Brain Warnings
Criteria Brain warnings are based upon your inputs we have been able to check Criteria Brain intelligence and report any issues that might exist. These are just advisory and will not prevent the lender from returning a result but should be noted and factored into your advice.
Being able to view all these warnings before running the calculation means that if you see a lender who might be excluded that you would like to be included you can go back to the first step and make changes before clicking the calculate button.
