Mortgage Brain has revealed more than 817,000 searches were carried out on its Criteria Hub last year, an increase of 147% on the 330,309 searches performed in 2018.

October was revealed to be the year’s busiest month, with almost 86,000 searches taking place, while on a quarterly basis the third quarter was the most active – with more than 220,000 searches being performed.

The technology provider said its Criteria Hub – which matches the needs of a customer with those of the lender – offers a ‘unique’ way of highlighting a client’s criteria that are critical, or deal breakers, and has more than 700 search criteria providing over 45,000 lender entries.

With every criteria verified by the relevant lender, Mortgage Brain said the vast suite of information covered allows advisers to save substantial amounts of time, which might otherwise be spent going through the criteria documentation from each individual lender.

The platform is also used by lenders to research and gain insight into the market, Mortgage Brain added, which enables them to design and finetune products to better meet the needs of customers.

Mortgage Brain CEO, Mark Lofthouse, commented: “The mortgage market is an incredibly competitive place, and this has led to lenders attempting to stand out from the crowd by adopting diverse criteria for their product ranges. With borrowers’ own circumstances increasingly more complex, matching the client with the right lender and product becomes more difficult and time-consuming.

“Technological solutions like Criteria Hub takes on a lot of the heavy lifting, allowing intermediaries to get detailed information from a host of lenders in a single place, and devote more of their time towards actually advising their clients. Criteria Hub is essentially the Google for mortgages, swiftly helping advisers identify precisely which lenders can support their clients’ needs.”

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