Client feedback spanning years points to a gap between what brokers prioritise and what borrowers say they value most
Every time mortgage rates shift, the industry asks the same questions: should borrowers fix now, have rates peaked, is this finally the right time to buy?
Michael Bennison (pictured top), managing director at Bennison Brown, believes that preoccupation with the numbers has come at a cost — and that the profession has been quietly losing sight of the person sitting on the other side of the desk.
His evidence comes not from market data but from the clients themselves. After revisiting hundreds of reviews left by borrowers over the past decade, Bennison found a pattern that was striking in its consistency: very few mentioned the interest rate they had secured.
Instead, the same themes appeared repeatedly across the feedback: communication, reassurance, guidance, patience and trust — qualities that, he argued, define the modern adviser's value far more than product selection alone.
"Mortgage rates matter," Bennison said. "Trust matters more."
Bennison contended that the adviser's role has evolved substantially beyond its origins in product knowledge. "Today's adviser is expected to interpret increasingly complex lending criteria, explain protection, coordinate with estate agents and solicitors, solve problems before they become crises and provide reassurance when transactions inevitably become stressful," Bennison said. "In many ways, we're no longer just mortgage advisers — we're project managers, educators and trusted guides through one of life's biggest financial decisions."
He highlighted one review that he described as encapsulating the broader finding: a client wrote that they never had to chase the adviser for anything and felt the team was fully invested in their outcome alongside them. Another noted that, despite finding the homebuying process overwhelming, everything was clearly communicated and they felt calm knowing the team was handling matters.
"Clients aren't simply paying for access to mortgage products," Bennison pointed out. "They're placing one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives into somebody else's hands and trusting them to take ownership of the outcome."
On the question of technology, Bennison acknowledged that artificial intelligence is already being used to automate administration and review documents, and said this trend would ultimately benefit advisers — by freeing them to focus on relationship-building, empathy and reassurance rather than repetitive tasks.
He was, however, direct about a professional failure he finds particularly frustrating. "One thing frustrates me more than almost anything else in our profession is not returning a client's call, leaving an email unanswered or allowing someone to spend a weekend wondering what's happening with one of the biggest financial commitments of their life," he said. "Clients will usually forgive bad news. What they rarely forgive is silence."
Bennison also challenged the instinct among advisers to default to technical information. Most clients, he said, want answers to three fundamental questions: whether they can buy a given property, whether they can afford it, and what happens next. The adviser's role, in his view, is to answer those questions first and reduce complexity rather than compound it.
His broader conclusion was that when clients return for subsequent transactions or refer family and friends, it is not because they recall the rate that was secured on their behalf. It is because they remember how they were treated during one of the most consequential moments of their financial lives.
"Trust is built one conversation, one promise and one client experience at a time," he concluded.
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