The mortgage industry is on the edge of a structural shift. That was unmistakable in the BSA's 2025 webinar where MHCLG, DPMSG and OPDA all set out the same direction of travel for the future of homebuying and selling.

Upfront information, shared data standards and trust frameworks are laying the new foundations for a redesigned property transaction. This is not an incremental update to how the system works. It is an overhaul of the infrastructure that lenders operate within.

The central message from my keynote at the event was direct. What got us here will not get us where we are going. Customer expectations are clear. They want certainty, transparency and genuine choice across the home buying and selling journey. And while speed matters, speed alone is not the goal. The real aim is predictability across the entire transaction.

We will not achieve this by continuing to optimise isolated internal processes when the real friction has always lived in the handoffs between the actor groups in the transaction.

The industry’s first phase of digitalisation laid important foundations, but it has reached a natural limit. Most lenders can now deliver Application to Offer in days. This is a significant achievement, but it has minimal impact on the end-to-end customer journey. The new battleground is Offer to Completion. This is the part of the journey lenders have not historically influenced and where three months (or more) of waiting often sits. It affects customers, it affects chains, and it affects the predictability of a lender’s pipeline and capital planning.

No amount of internal modernisation will remove friction that exists outside the walls of a lender. Only interoperability can do that. And interoperability depends on breaking out of our current silos and working through shared data standards, platform thinking and open infrastructure. This is the second phase of transformation; Horizontal Digital Integration (HDI). Without HDI, the goals we all agree on remain out of reach. HDI brings together previously isolated systems across the home buying journey, so they operate as part of an integrated framework.

The customer journey is already being redesigned around this new reality. Upfront information is transforming the work that happens before offer. Orchestration and data standards are reshaping the work that happens after. Lenders can either lean in now and help shape this design or wait and adapt to a model set by others. Waiting is not neutral. It is a strategic choice to follow rather than lead.

The vendor landscape reinforces this shift. Where once the market lacked clear differentiation, it is now separating into specialists, integrators and full ecosystem orchestrators. Understanding which partners are prepared for HDI, and which are still building toward it, will be essential in 2026. Choosing the wrong path risks getting locked into solutions that cannot support the future infrastructure of the market.

Many lenders are already deep into transformation programmes for core banking, origination or digital channels. These programmes matter, but HDI does not compete with them. It guides and sequences them, so that transformation programmes land in the right direction. You do not need to be digitally perfect before you start. But we do need to acknowledge that tomorrow’s market will not look like today, and what got us here, won’t get us there.

The industry is moving to a model built on data, trust and interoperability. HDI gives lenders the chance to lead rather than follow. The question is not whether the shift will happen. It is whether you are prepared to be an agent of change and lead the market or adapt to it later.

Find out more:

https://www.novus-strategy.com/
https://www.novus-strategy.com/horizontal-digital-integration/

This article was first published in Society Matters magazine.