AI email drafts for mortgage brokers

Document chasing is the most-repeated writing task in a brokerage and the least-thought-about. The same email goes out hundreds of times a year, usually typed quickly, usually vaguer than it should be, and a meaningful share of case delay traces back to it.

Drafting help is genuinely useful here. But the gain comes from having better chasers, not merely faster ones, and those are different projects.

Why chasers fail

Read back a few of your own and the pattern is usually one of four things.

They ask for a category rather than an item. "Three months' bank statements" invites a screenshot of a banking app, a partial PDF with the balance cropped out, or statements for the wrong account.

They bundle. Six requests in one paragraph produces two of the six, and then a second email that repeats all six, which reads as though you were not paying attention.

They give no reason. People deprioritise requests they do not understand. One clause explaining that the lender needs the statement to verify the deposit source raises the response rate more than any amount of polite phrasing.

They have no deadline, or a fake one. "As soon as possible" means whenever. A real date tied to a real consequence gets acted on.

A drafting tool will happily reproduce all four failures at speed if you let it. What it will do well is apply a strong structure consistently, once you have decided what that structure is.

What to give the tool

The quality of a drafted chaser is almost entirely determined by what you put in.

Give it the specific items outstanding, with the detail that removes ambiguity: which employer, which months, which account, whether a document must be a full statement rather than a summary. Give it the reason the lender wants each one. Give it the deadline and what happens if it slips. Give it the client's situation in one line, because a self-employed applicant and a salaried one need different framing.

Then give it constraints on the writing itself: how long, what reading level, no jargon, no acronyms, and the specific tone your firm uses. Most default output is a shade too formal for a mortgage client and a shade too keen on the word "kindly".

What you should not give it is the client's actual financial data. There is no reason for a drafting tool to see the payslip. It only needs to know one is missing.

What drafting tools do well here

Consistency across advisers, which is worth more than it sounds. Three advisers writing their own chasers produce three standards of client experience within one firm.

Adapting register. The same request, written once firmly for a client who has ignored two previous emails and once gently for someone who has just been made redundant, is exactly the sort of rewriting these tools handle competently.

Producing the shorter version. Ask for something cut to eighty words and you generally get a better email than the one you wrote.

Translating your internal shorthand into plain English. "We need proof of the gifted deposit and a donor declaration" becomes something a first-time buyer can act on without ringing you to ask what a donor declaration is.

What stays with you

Anything that states a lender's requirement as fact. If the draft says a lender needs six months rather than three, and it is wrong, the client does the wrong work and blames you. Check requirements against the criteria source, every time. Models produce confident specifics about lender policy that are not reliable.

Anything that implies a decision or a likelihood. A chaser that says the application should be fine once the statements arrive is a sentence you may have to defend later.

Anything sent to a client you know is struggling. Those go out with a person's attention on them.

What a chaser must never ask for

This one is worth a policy, not a preference.

Never ask for documents to be emailed as attachments if you have a secure upload route, and say so explicitly in the message. Payslips, statements and identity documents in an email inbox are a data protection problem for both of you.

Never include a link that could be mistaken for a payment page, and never ask for bank details, card details or a password in any form. Conveyancing fraud is a real and current problem, clients are primed to be suspicious, and a well-written email asking for financial documents is exactly what a fraudulent one looks like.

Do the opposite instead. Tell the client, in every document request, what your firm will never ask for and how to verify a message is from you. It costs two sentences.

Because these messages carry personal and often special category data, the route you offer matters more than the wording around it. Under UK GDPR you are expected to use appropriate security for the data you handle, and unencrypted email attachments are a weak answer if a client's file ever leaks.

Build a library, not a habit

Generating a fresh draft every time is the wrong use of the tool. You will get variable quality and no institutional memory.

Instead, use it once to produce a strong version of each recurring request. First chase for employed income evidence. Second chase, firmer. Identity documents. Bank statements with a deposit source query. Self-employed accounts. Chase after silence. Then have an adviser and whoever handles compliance in your firm review each one properly.

Store them where they get used, which usually means in the case management system rather than in a shared folder. Per case, the tool's job is then small and safe: adapt the approved template to this client's specific missing items and circumstances, and leave the substance alone.

The check before sending

Read the draft asking three questions. Does it name exactly what is missing, in a form the client could act on without replying to ask? Does it say why? Does it say by when, and where to send it?

If any answer is no, the email is not ready, however well written it is.