The summary
Building societies are investing in modernisation, but moving legacy processes onto new technology does not automatically create transformation. The real opportunity lies in rethinking how data moves through the mortgage journey — replacing manual document handling and fragmented workflows with structured data, automated validation and more connected decision-making.
Jerry Mulle, UK Managing Director at Ohpen, explores why closing the gap between digital ambition and operational impact requires more than modern infrastructure. It means changing the processes behind it, enabling operational teams to spend less time moving and validating information and more time acting on it.
The trap of migration thinking
Building societies know they need to modernise. The intent is clear, investment conversations are happening, and competitive pressure is real. Yet a persistent gap remains between that intent and its operational impact. The question worth asking is why.
The dominant frame for digital transformation in the mutual sector remains infrastructure: systems, platforms and migrations. That framing carries a hidden assumption — that moving existing processes into a cloud environment is itself the change. It isn’t.
A manual process running on modern infrastructure is still a manual process. The friction hasn’t been eliminated; it’s been relocated.
Nowhere is this more visible than in how borrower data moves through a mortgage application. A single case touches multiple teams and systems — sales, credit decisioning, underwriting, fraud prevention and back-office operations — and at the centre of that chain sits the physical collection and validation of evidence.
Payslips, bank statements, P60s, tax calculations and identity documents are gathered, checked, submitted, reviewed and frequently requested again.
Brokers assemble and package this information. Lenders deconstruct it, extract what they need, cross-reference it manually and often send it back to the intermediary to start again. The result is delay, operational cost and a process designed for a fundamentally different era of lending.
What has changed around the process
The environment building societies operate in has moved on, even if many of the underlying processes haven’t.
Brokers expect faster decisions and fewer administrative touchpoints. Borrowers expect clarity and consistency at every stage. Regulators require demonstrable accuracy and comprehensive, auditable records.
Meeting all three expectations simultaneously through manual document handling is becoming increasingly difficult — and increasingly inefficient.
The constraint isn’t ambition. Building societies have plenty of that. The constraint is an operating model designed for a world where physical evidence was the only evidence available.
Where genuine transformation starts
The real opportunity isn’t to build better portals for document uploads. It’s to change how lenders interact with the data those documents contain.
A modern approach enables automatic extraction of key data points at the point of submission — identifying the applicant they relate to, validating references and dates, and flagging discrepancies before they become more complex issues downstream.
Income can be analysed in context rather than captured as a single static figure. Overtime patterns, shift allowances and National Insurance contributions relative to statutory thresholds can all be assessed automatically and at scale.
When extracted data is cross-referenced against verified external sources, origination can move away from a series of manual handoffs towards a connected, data-driven workflow.
Directorships, company information, existing charges and ownership structures can be validated directly rather than relying solely on submitted paperwork.
The efficiency gain matters. But the more significant shift is structural: operational teams stop being the mechanism by which information is moved around and start being the people who act on it.
That is the difference between digitising an existing mortgage process and genuinely transforming it.
The pressure building societies can’t wait out
Manual processes place a disproportionate burden on operational teams — a burden that makes it harder to deliver the responsiveness that brokers and members increasingly expect, precisely when regulatory demands are rising. Those two pressures don’t ease with time. They compound.
Technology, deployed correctly, resolves the tension. Not by digitising the old model, but by replacing the assumptions behind it. Building societies aren’t short of ambition. What’s needed is a sharper focus on where that ambition is applied — and a willingness to change behaviour, not just venue.
Jerry Mulle is UK Managing Director at Ohpen. The original version of this article was first published in the Building Societies Association Annual Conference 2026 publication.