Our Lifetime Mortgage Underwriting Promise: Delivering Best Outcomes for You and Your Clients

Our Underwriting Promise

At Pure Retirement, we recognise that the key to your success rests with ensuring you receive expert help throughout lifetime mortgage applications. There are always applications that sail through, with no need for any intervention or extra information - and let's face it, we all love them. But on the flipside, there are those trickier cases that need further clarification, extra information and advice from an underwriting expert.

Imagine having a single point of contact who oversees your case from the initial valuation, right the way through to offer and everything in between, providing a consistent, reliable presence at every step of your journey. The good news is that you don't have to wonder any more, because it's a reality with Pure.

Our team of underwriters are on hand to track and monitor your applications, providing their expertise, when required, giving you the right decision at the right time, every time. They're trained to put the customer first, seeking to balance the customer's application and property criteria with our product specifications and our risk appetite, looking at your mortgage application, the client, and the property against which they are raising funds.

There are three key stages in which our underwriters will assess your case:

1. Once your application has been received.
2. When your valuation has been received.
3. At the offer stage, when all our checks have been performed.

A formal offer is issued, and at this point, it's over to the solicitors to work towards completion.

How do we support you and your clients?

The Underwriting teams are structured so that they have specific underwriters dedicated to care for specific groups of advisers, each with their own manager and senior underwriter.

Our focus is on clear communication with you in your preferred manner, with a focus on contact by phone, with a dedicated underwriter who takes full ownership of each case from application to offer that ensures they get to know you, your case and can easily pick up where they left off, to deliver best outcomes.

Our underwriters see beyond the application number, approaching each case on its own merits, and taking the time to call to explain our decision. They'll also suggest whether the case may be considered on one of our alternative plans if the application is initially declined on the original product. This honest and upfront communication leads to better outcomes for advisers and customers alike and helps ensure the appropriate product and service are delivered.

As an example of our processes in action to deliver results, we recently had a property located on an unadopted and unmade road that is also a through road which is outside Classic criteria so historically would have been declined.

This approach of innovative thinking and embracing a bespoke and holistic view of each individual case, we reviewed the property again and given the location, the positive valuation and the fact that only residents of that street would use it as a through road, we put a common sense and positive business case to the funder rather than declining. They agreed to proceed and the offer was issued, making the clients' dreams come true on a case we would have declined had we taken a hard and fast approach to criteria eligibility.

What results have these processes delivered?

We've prided ourselves on our lifetime mortgage pre-completion service levels, monitoring them over several key metrics on a monthly, quarterly and year-to-date basis. We're pleased to share that in 2023:

• 96.6% of equity release applications were processed within two hours
• 100% of equity release applications were processed on the day of receipt
• 99.9% of brokers' emails to underwriters were actioned within four hours
• 99.7% of valuations were assessed on the date of receipt

Enhancing the application journey with our online application

Our approach to lifetime mortgage applications is to gather as much information upfront to help our underwriting team process each claim accurately and efficiently and reducing timescales to offer.

With this in mind, we've enhanced our online application form, including a dynamic question set that's able to adapt to the individual circumstances of each case and meaning that you will only be faced with questions that are relevant.

Why not try it for your next case?