Do mortgage brokers need a CRM?

Not always. That is an unpopular answer in an industry where every conference stand sells one, but a sole adviser writing thirty cases a year with a good diary and a disciplined filing habit is not obviously worse off for lacking a subscription.

The honest version of the question is narrower: at what point does not having one start costing you more than having one? This piece offers four tests. If you fail two of them, you have outgrown whatever you are using now.

Test one: can someone else answer for you?

Take a live case at random. Now imagine you are unreachable for a week and a client rings the office.

Can a colleague establish, without contacting you, what stage the case is at, what the client was last told, what is outstanding and who is waiting on whom? If the answer requires access to your inbox or your memory, you have a continuity problem. That is a business risk before it is a software problem, and it is the single most common reason firms finally buy something.

A sole trader with no colleagues can substitute a different scenario: you are ill for ten days. What happens to the six cases mid-flight?

Test two: how many clients do you never contact again?

Count the mortgages you arranged three years ago. Now count how many of those clients you spoke to before their fixed rate ended.

If the second number is much smaller than the first, you are paying for lead generation twice. Product transfer and remortgage business from your existing book is the cheapest business a brokerage can write, and it depends entirely on knowing when each client's rate expires and having something automatic that raises its hand.

You can do this in a calendar. Plenty of brokers have, for years. It works until the book is big enough that the reminders become a background hum you start ignoring.

Test three: how long does a file review take?

Someone asks for evidence on a case from eighteen months ago. The fact find, the sourcing rationale, the suitability letter, the disclosure documents, the client's confirmations, the correspondence.

If assembling that takes an afternoon of searching email and folders, the cost is not just the afternoon. It is the quiet reluctance to review your own files, which is exactly the habit Consumer Duty expects firms to have.

Test four: do you know your numbers without doing arithmetic?

Conversion from enquiry to appointment. Appointment to application. Application to completion. Average case size. Procuration fees due versus received.

A firm that has to build these from scratch each quarter will build them rarely and then make decisions on impressions instead. This is the test that matters least for a solo adviser and most for a principal with employed advisers, because it is the only way to tell whether a hiring decision worked.

When the answer is genuinely no

There are situations where buying a CRM is the wrong move.

If your network already provides one and mandates its use, buying a second system creates two versions of the truth. Appointed representatives often have less choice here than they realise, and it is worth reading the agreement before shopping.

If your process is genuinely unformed — you do not yet have a standard set of documents you request, a standard sequence of client contacts, or an agreed definition of when a case is dead — software will preserve that inconsistency rather than resolve it. A month spent writing down how you want cases to run is worth more than a subscription.

And if the actual problem is that you have too few enquiries, a CRM will organise your shortage beautifully without addressing it.

What a CRM does not do

It does not make you call clients. It does not stop advisers keeping private notes. It does not improve the quality of your advice, and it will not rescue a file whose fact find was thin.

It also does not remove the need for a filing discipline. Systems store what you put in them, and a CRM with half-completed records is more dangerous than a spreadsheet, because people trust it.

If you decide you do need one

Start from the two or three things that are actually hurting. Most firms find those are rate-expiry tracking, document collection and case visibility. A product that does those three well is better than one that does eleven things adequately.

Look at broker-specific platforms rather than general business CRMs. Acre, Smartr365 and others in the UK intermediary market are built around fact finds, sourcing, compliance evidence and lender workflow, which a generic sales CRM is not. Check current capability and pricing with the vendors, since both change.

Then agree, before you migrate anything, what one field means. "Active" is a word every adviser in your firm will define differently, and a system full of ambiguous statuses answers no questions at all.

The short version

If you are one adviser, well organised, with a small book and a habit of reviewing clients, you can defer this. If you are two or more people, or your book has passed the point where you can recall who is coming up for renewal, the question stops being whether and becomes which.