A joint survey by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), published in November 2024, found that 75% of UK financial services firms are already using AI, up from 58% in 2022. For consumers, that growing presence has a flip side – as AI tools become more accessible, so does the misinformation they can generate.
Clients still want a human conversation
Stallard is clear the clients his firm works with continue to place significant value on speaking to a person, particularly when the decision at hand is a mortgage, which for most borrowers represents the largest financial commitment of their lives.
“I still think that the majority of clients we deal with and help value that human advice,” he said. “Maybe AI is improving processes and ways of working and ways of helping clients, and there will be more self-serve business as the straightforward vanilla stuff can get the process behind it a little bit easier.”
But for anything beyond the straightforward, he argued, there remains a strong case for broker involvement. “These are for most people the biggest investment that they’re making in their life,” he said. “And so speaking with a human and running through options, scenarios and factors you hadn’t been considered on and been challenged on after what you’ve read online, there is still a value to that advice.”
That challenge function – brokers pushing clients to interrogate their own assumptions rather than simply acting on what they have read online – is one that Stallard sees as increasingly important as AI-generated information becomes more widely accessible. “We’re probably seeing more work getting checked and assumptions getting checked through, ‘Well, I read this online’ or through an AI or things like that than we’ve ever seen before, so that’s certainly interesting,” he said.