Another very interesting week culminating in an article in virtually every paper saying that we were on the brink of a second collapse…where have they been hiding their heads?!

If that isn’t bad enough, we had the Blackberry Blackout alongside a lesser issue for Apple but the press still managed to print the headline “Apple and Blackberry crumble” pure genius, it’s hard to imagine anything else getting close to the wit shown there…unless you read one of Sir Rob Jupp’s (am I too early) articles…crammed tight with big words and sarcasm unrivalled in any other industry publication…! Mind you a big word for Rob would be one written in large print and block capitals…ouch!

From one misguided individual to another, I read Alan Cleary’s article in Mortgage Strategy and was stunned to see that even following the collapse of the technology based underwriting systems he still feels that this is the way forward…he is so wrong about the issue and for a guy who I really do respect I am very surprised. I have never been a fan of relying solely on credit scoring systems because they have very little tolerance and I have witnessed first hand cases that have gone through systems and those that have not and I still strongly believe that manual sign-off is the sensible route. In fact the best way of underwriting is a mixture of the two, first pass credit score, second pass manual review, obviously the argument surrounding all of this is cost, however, if we had more manual underwriting in the first place we may not have been having this debate in the first place because the cost of not manually underwriting has been the biggest one of all the industry. Actually I would like to see some comparisons from the third party administrators, Oakwood, Target, Veritus etc. I suspect that if we have a conversation with those at Claytons, like Tim Keast and the ex CEO of Edeus Michael Bolton (an ex-colleague of both Alan and I), they would have a similar view to me, perhaps Bridging and Commercial as a publication should take a long hard look at this part of the industry and ask some of those other respected pundits…The long and the short of it is that history already has enough proof to show technology was always a way of making a process cheaper and yes, more efficient but at what real cost. I sincerely hope that Alan doesn’t take offence at my comments as they are only an opinion (a correct one but still only an opinion).

Finally…what happened in the Rugby is a disgrace and I am going to go and get an All Blacks kit now because possibly the second worst (real) side in the tournament has limped to the final and it’s the “bloody French”. The Welsh came second in a competition with a side that they would have put 20 points bet? Did the ref want to be famous for ruining a great tournament…well he has done it, and to add insult to injury the Welsh captain received a ban ruling him out of the Bronze position play-off and in my opinion it was just to make the ref feel better… “Same old froggies always cheating” (remember Thierry Henry and the Irish).

Anyway have another great week

Terry P