Nicola Firth, Knowledge Bank

Knowledge Bank bolsters team after surge in broker users




Knowledge Bank has expanded after appointing three new roles.

Since the start of the pandemic, the take up of Knowledge Bank’s system by mortgage brokers is said to have increased “significantly”, due to lenders’ criteria changing on a daily basis.  

This has led to the need for a new broker support role; a digital executive to report into chief technical officer Craig Flannigan, who created the Knowledge Bank system; and a new head of media sales. 

Paul Hunt — who has looked after media sales for Knowledge Bank for the past two years — will now focus specifically on Knowledge Bank’s marketing.

He will expand the criteria search system’s range of educational webinars, in addition to developing opportunities for the company as a whole. 

“Our new head of media sales will expand on our highly popular, educational webinar programme and will help to [grow] Knowledge Bank still further,” said Nicola Firth, CEO at Knowledge Bank (pictured above).

“As a result of this substantial increase in brokers using the search system, we are appointing a broker support co-ordinator.

“Part of their job will be to gather brokers’ feedback on how Knowledge Bank is working for them which will then feed into future development to ensure that we remain the leading criteria search system in the UK. 

“We already have a rapid pace of development, but the new digital executive will then help to ensure that we continue to be responsive with developments implemented as quickly as possible.”

Knowledge Bank now contains over 111,000 different criteria from over 200 lenders across bridging, commercial, residential, BTL, second-charge, self-build, and equity release loans. 

When the chancellor announced that payment holidays were available, the system responded by providing a free Covid-19 feed of lender changes of criteria to help brokers to stay on top of developments which led to the surge in brokers using the system.

Brokers can put an unlimited number of search criteria in when looking for the best loan for their clients, and are provided with evidence of research.  

“The need for a comprehensive criteria search system has come into its own in the past two years, but particularly since the outbreak of Covid-19,” Nicola added.

“There were weeks during lockdown where there were in excess of a thousand criteria changes in a single week and we are still seeing several hundred changes per week now.  

“It was simply impossible for mortgage brokers to keep on top of the vast swathe of changes that were happening without the use of Knowledge Bank.”

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