Why Brokers and Lenders Are Switching to Open Banking SaaS: What It's Worth to Your Bottom Line

There is a version of this conversation that gets bogged down in APIs, PSD2 compliance and data categorisation models. This is not that conversation. This is about return on investment, competitive advantage and the very practical question of whether open banking technology makes commercial sense for your firm. The short answer, based on the evidence now accumulating across the UK mortgage market, is yes; quite clearly. But let's look at the numbers.

The Problem Open Banking Solves (That You Already Know About)

Every broker and lender knows the pain points. Bank statement analysis takes days. Document requests create friction and drop-off. Manual underwriting of complex cases (self-employed applicants, variable income earners, joint applications with disparate income sources) absorbs underwriter time that could be spent elsewhere. And throughout the process, there's a nagging risk that the picture you're basing a decision on is incomplete.

Open banking doesn't remove underwriting judgment. What it does is radically change the quality and speed of the data feeding into that judgment. And when you have better data faster, everything downstream improves.

The Evidence: What Early Adopters Are Seeing

Leeds Building Society + Experian: The Benchmark Case

The Leeds Building Society/Experian open banking mortgage pilot with L&C Mortgages is the most thoroughly documented implementation in the UK mortgage market to date. The results:

• Decision in Principle turnaround: from 24 hours to 11 seconds for eligible cases
• Bank statement retrieval: from four days to minutes
• Journey automation: 80% of the application process automated
• Consent rate: 50% of sole applicants connected their account (vs 10% anticipated)
• Completion rate: 95% of those who started the open banking flow completed it
• Credit improvement: 7.5% of applicants would have seen improved credit scores through Experian Boost data

These are not marginal gains. A DIP in 11 seconds versus 24 hours is the difference between a broker staying on the phone with a client while they complete an AIP, versus asking them to wait and calling them back tomorrow. The compounding effect on case volumes, client satisfaction and broker relationships is significant.

Hinckley & Rugby Building Society + LendingMetrics: Real-Time Categorisation

Hinckley & Rugby's adoption of LendingMetrics' OpenBankVision (OBV) in November 2024 demonstrates the practical value for a regional building society. OBV connects to 99% of UK banks and delivers real-time, fully categorised transaction data; this means underwriters see not just raw transactions but organised income, expenditure and risk flags. Notably, it also detects undisclosed credit commitments automatically, reducing the risk of downstream fraud.

For a lender managing volume across a broker network, the ability to identify application fraud at the point of data submission, before a case progresses, is a direct cost saving.

Abound: Open Banking at Scale

Abound's results in the personal lending space are instructive even for mortgage lenders. Using its proprietary Render platform (open banking + AI), Abound has:

• Facilitated over £1 billion in lending
• Achieved 75% fewer defaults than the industry standard
• Generated £8 million in net profit for the year to February 2025
• Secured €300 million in new financing from Deutsche Bank

When open banking-powered underwriting produces 75% lower defaults, the economic case is straightforward: lower credit losses more than offset the cost of the technology. In mortgage lending, where a single default can cost tens of thousands of pounds in arrears management, legal costs and property sales, this differential compounds dramatically.

The SaaS Landscape: Who's Providing This Technology?

Several mature providers are already operating in this space in the UK. Understanding the market is important context for any lender or broker evaluating options.

LendingMetrics (OpenBankVision)

LendingMetrics is one of the UK's most established credit decision technology companies, with OpenBankVision connecting to 99% of UK banks. Their Auto Decision Platform (ADP) allows credit risk teams to build and deploy decision logic without writing code; a significant advantage for lenders who want to customise their affordability models without large IT projects. Adopted by Hinckley & Rugby Building Society in 2024.

Experian Open Banking / Cashflow Analytics

Experian's open banking offering sits within its broader credit decisioning infrastructure, giving lenders the ability to combine open banking transaction data with traditional credit report data in a single workflow. The Leeds Building Society case demonstrates the power of this combination; the credit boost data and the speed gains both flow from the same integration.

Bud Financial

Bud is an AI-driven data intelligence platform used by major institutions including HSBC. Its open banking lending tools deliver what Bud describes as an 85% increase in underwriting capacity when combined with AI-driven affordability assessments. Bud raised $80 million in Series B funding, reflecting institutional confidence in the space.

Finicity (Mastercard)

Now part of Mastercard, Finicity's open banking platform provides up to two years of income history in 30 seconds, with confidence-scored income stream identification. Primarily US-focused but with growing UK presence, Finicity is the infrastructure partner behind many lenders' income verification workflows.

Moxim: Bringing This Capability to Brokers and Smaller Lenders

Moxim is building a SaaS affordability layer specifically designed for brokers and lenders who want the benefits of open banking-powered assessment without the complexity and cost of enterprise integrations. Our platform connects to your existing workflow via API, delivers categorised transaction analysis and affordability scoring, and outputs lender-ready reports that your underwriters can act on immediately.

Unlike the enterprise platforms listed above, Moxim is designed to be accessible: fast to deploy, transparent in its methodology and commercially structured for firms that aren't household names. We are currently onboarding our first lender and broker partners. If you want to be among the first to use it and to shape how it develops, now is the time to talk.

A Worked Example for a Mid-Sized Broker Firm

Take a broker firm processing 200 cases a month, with an average underwriting and document chasing time of six hours per case under manual bank statement review. Cutting that to two hours per case through open banking categorisation frees up roughly 800 hours a month across the team, time that converts directly into either more cases handled with the same headcount, or the same caseload handled with fewer staff hours and less overtime.

At a conservative blended cost of £35 an hour for underwriting and admin time, that difference is worth close to £28,000 a month, or well over £300,000 a year, before accounting for the additional revenue from faster case turnaround and improved client retention. Set against a SaaS subscription cost, the payback period for most firms is measured in weeks, not years.

Why Smaller Lenders and Building Societies Are Moving Fastest

It is worth noting who is adopting this technology first. Leeds Building Society, Hinckley and Rugby, and a growing number of regional building societies are ahead of several larger high street names, not because they have bigger technology budgets, but because the efficiency gain matters proportionally more to a smaller underwriting team with limited headcount to throw at a growing caseload.

For a broker network deciding which lenders to prioritise, this is a useful signal in itself: lenders investing in faster, more accurate affordability assessment today are typically the same lenders investing in service levels more broadly, which tends to show up in turnaround times across the rest of the case journey too.

The ROI Case: What Does It Actually Cost Not to Do This?

Let's be direct about the return on investment question, because it's the right question. If a broker firm processes 200 mortgage applications a month, and open banking reduces the average time to DIP from 24 hours to under an hour, the capacity gain is substantial. Fewer chasers. Fewer document re-requests. Fewer cases that drop off during the waiting period. The same headcount processing materially higher volume.

If a lender's default rate drops from, say, 2% to 1.5% as a result of better affordability data (a conservative improvement given Abound's 75% default reduction) on a £100 million mortgage book, that's £500,000 in avoided losses per year. The cost of the technology is a fraction of that figure.

There is also a less-discussed benefit: the reputational cost of a wrong decision. A mortgage applicant who is approved for more than they can afford is not just a credit risk; they are a customer service problem, a potential FCA enforcement risk and a human cost. Better data reduces the incidence of unsuitable lending, which is increasingly something the regulator cares about.

The Honest Caveat

Open banking is not a silver bullet. Data quality depends on the quality of the bank connection and the categorisation model. Not all applicants will have bank accounts that provide clean, easily categorised data. There will always be cases that require human judgment. And consent rates, while improving, are not 100%; you need a fallback process for applicants who don't complete the open banking flow.

The firms winning with this technology are those who use it as one layer of a well-designed decisioning process, not as a replacement for underwriting judgment, but as a dramatically better starting point.

What to Do Next

If you're a broker or lender who has been watching the open banking space and wondering when to move, the answer emerging from the market is: the early movers are already pulling ahead. Leeds Building Society, Hinckley & Rugby, Abound and others are not running experiments any more; they are building operational processes around this data.

Moxim would like to help you do the same. We're a small, focused team building practical open banking tooling for the mortgage market. We're not selling a vision; we're building a product and looking for the right early partners to grow with.

Join the broker pilot →