How to compare mortgage broker CRMs

Feature grids are almost useless for this decision. Every serious contender ticks every box, because the boxes were written by whoever produced the grid and the vendors have all read it. You end up comparing marketing departments.

A better method has four parts: define your own tests before you look at anything, script the demos so vendors cannot control them, talk to firms like yours, and read the contract properly. Roughly a month of elapsed time, most of it waiting.

Part one: write your tests first

Before any demo, write down between six and ten scenarios drawn from your actual week. Not requirements — scenarios, with names and details.

Good ones tend to be the awkward cases. A self-employed applicant with two years of accounts and a director's loan. A joint application where one party is overseas. A case where the lender withdraws the product before offer and you have to re-source and re-document. A client who completes, then asks nine months later for a copy of everything you hold about them.

Rank these by how often they occur and how painful they currently are. That ranking becomes your scoring weight, and it stops the decision being won by whichever demo you happened to see last.

Add a small number of non-negotiables. If your network mandates a system, or you must keep data in the UK, or you need a specific sourcing integration, say so up front and disqualify early rather than falling in love with something unusable.

Part two: run the demo, do not receive it

Send your scenarios to each vendor a week ahead and ask them to work through yours instead of theirs. Vendors who refuse have told you something.

During the session, watch for click count. How many actions does it take to record a phone call against a case? To add a document request? To find every client whose rate expires in a given month? Small friction in daily actions compounds far more than a missing feature you would use twice a year.

Insist that someone who will actually use the system every day attends and drives part of it. Principals evaluate systems on reporting; administrators evaluate them on typing, and administrators are right.

Ask the vendor to show you something failing. What the screen looks like when an import is malformed, when a document upload times out, when a user makes a mistake. Recovery behaviour is where products differ and demos never go.

Score against your written scenarios the same day, before the next demo blurs it.

Part three: references, chosen by you

Ask each vendor for three customers. Then ignore two of them and find your own, by asking in broker forums and networks for firms of similar size and case mix.

Useful questions for a reference call: how long until the team stopped complaining; what still gets done outside the system; how many support tickets in the last quarter and how quickly they were answered; what they would configure differently if starting again; what the migration was genuinely like.

The most revealing question is what they still keep in a spreadsheet. Everyone keeps something.

Part four: the contract

This is where the real differences sit, and it is the part most firms skim.

Check the exit terms. What format does your data come out in, does it include documents and notes or only structured fields, is there a charge, and how long after termination can you request it.

Check the term and the notice period. Annual contracts with automatic renewal and a ninety-day notice window are common and easy to miss.

Check what happens to price at renewal. An uplift capped to a published index is very different from an uplift at the supplier's discretion.

Check the data processing terms. Where is data hosted, who are the sub-processors, what are the breach notification timescales, and how are your obligations as controller supported. If you are directly authorised this is your responsibility alone; if you are an appointed representative your network may have views.

Check what "unlimited" means. Unlimited users, storage or support usually has a fair-use clause behind it.

Costs that do not appear in the quote

Migration, whether the vendor charges for it or you absorb it in staff time. Configuration and template building. Training, including the second round three months later when you discover half the team is using it wrong. The productivity dip during cutover. And the person in your firm who becomes the de facto system owner, whose time is real even though it never appears as an invoice.

Deciding

Take the two highest scoring products and run each on three live cases for a fortnight, in parallel with your existing process. Yes, that means double entry for two weeks. It is the cheapest insurance available and it routinely changes the answer.

Then pick, and write down why, in a paragraph. In eighteen months when someone asks why you chose this thing, you will want that paragraph.

A word on the named platforms

Acre, Smartr365, Twenty7Tec, IRESS and the systems supplied by networks all appear on UK broker shortlists, and each publishes its own capability and pricing. Those change often enough that no article should be your source. Use this method to test them against your firm, and verify every specific with the supplier directly.