The Financial Times recently posed a provocative question: could AI fundamentally disrupt mortgage brokers – and are we witnessing the beginning of the end for traditional mortgage advice?
I believe this is the wrong question. AI will not replace mortgage brokers.
But it will replace firms that fail to adapt – firms that continue to think about mortgages in isolation rather than the broader customer journey.
The future of mortgage advice is AI-enabled, not AI-replaced.
WHERE THE FT IS RIGHT
The article is correct on one thing: AI will absolutely change the mortgage industry. Firms that ignore it will struggle. The operating model of mortgage advice is already shifting, and AI will make great advisers dramatically more productive.
But the broader disruption thesis rests on a flawed assumption. The real disruption opportunity, however, is not mortgages. It is homebuying itself.
WE HAVE ALREADY RUN THIS EXPERIMENT
The idea that technology will replace mortgage brokers is not new. Consumers have long been able to compare rates on comparison sites, apply directly to lenders, and manage the process themselves. That infrastructure has existed for over a decade.
And yet mortgage intermediaries today account for more than 90% of UK mortgage transactions – and that market share has grown significantly over the last 10 years.
Several well-funded businesses attempted to disrupt mortgages directly over the last decade. Many discovered that the challenge was not technology itself but the narrow framing of the problem.
Why? Because consumers are not just optimising for the cheapest rate. They are optimising for certainty, confidence, and getting the move completed. The real customer truth is simple: people want to buy a home – not manage a mortgage broker, conveyancer, surveyor, insurer and estate agent separately.
Nobody wakes up excited about their loan-to-value ratio. Nobody lies awake thinking about fixed versus tracker rates for their own sake. People lie awake wondering whether their offer will be accepted and whether they will actually be moving in before Christmas.
The mortgage is one node in a deeply fragmented, profoundly stressful journey that involves estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors, lenders, brokers, and Land Registry – each operating differently.
AI that makes the mortgage node 30% faster does not fix this. It optimises one piece of a broken system and leaves everything else untouched.
“The real disruption is the end-to-end experience.”
The real disruption is the end-to-end experience. A new category is beginning to emerge: Integrated Homebuying.
For years, the industry has tried to fix individual components – mortgage tech, legal tech, comparison websites, property portals. Solving one part has never solved the real problem.
The future is not mortgage technology. It is not conveyancing technology. And it is certainly not replacing advisers with AI.
The future is Integrated Homebuying: a connected journey where financing, legal work, surveys, insurance, communication and transaction management come together in one place. The firms that win over the next decade will not simply originate mortgages. They will orchestrate the entire homebuying experience.
At OneDome, this thinking led us to build HomeBuyer Service – not as another mortgage proposition, but as an integrated homebuying experience designed around how customers actually behave.
AI will be enormously valuable in making that possible – but we should be realistic about what it can and cannot do.
“Buying a home is not simply a data problem.”
Buying a home is not simply a data problem. It is emotional, legal and operational. It involves multiple parties, changing circumstances, trust, reassurance and the kind of coordination and problem-solving that resists full automation.
Anyone who has bought a home knows this instinctively: the challenge is rarely finding a mortgage. The challenge is getting the move done.
The winners of the next decade will not resist AI, nor will they try to remove humans from the equation entirely.
They will combine human expertise, AI capability and Integrated Homebuying – because ultimately, the biggest opportunity is not disrupting mortgages.
It is reinventing homebuying itself.
