Nottingham Building Society has announced the full market launch of its IDI (Inviting Difference In) Broker Portal.
The platform is designed to transform the mortgage journey for brokers and their clients, combining advanced AI-driven processing with a faster, more intuitive application process.
The 176-year-old mutual partnered with London & Country at the end of 2024 and across the first half of 2025 to trial the effectiveness of the platform. Following a successful phased trial, the platform has been rolled out to all brokers.
The society claims it will make full decisions on residential mortgage applications significantly more quickly than the market average of 10 to 14 days. The platform, which automates the entire underwriting process, will not only speed up the decision-making process, but also deliver frictionless customer and broker experience. During the first half of 2025, the society also announced it had helped over 4,000 people buy a home.
The portal is designed to take the friction out of the mortgage journey, giving brokers faster decisions, greater certainty, and more time to focus on their clients. It can assess around 20,000 data points in real time thanks to its AI and machine learning capabilities, automatically validating documents and affordability, and only requesting additional information when it’s needed. The result is fewer bottlenecks, fewer delays, and decisions delivered in minutes instead of weeks.
For brokers, the society claims that the IDI represents a step change in lending. The platform is fully configurable to lending criteria and risk appetite, allowing Nottingham Building Society to respond more quickly to market needs, scale up without increasing cost-to-serve, and deliver smarter, more personalised mortgage options for a wider range of customers. By combining automation with advanced analytics, IDI doesn’t just make mortgages quicker – it makes them simpler, more certain, and ultimately more accessible.
While residential applications are the first products and propositions on the platform, Nottingham Building Society has confirmed that its buy-to-let, foreign national applications and future propositions will be adopted by the new technology as part of the ongoing phased integration.
A spokesperson comments: “We have spent the last two years building and upgrading a lot of our technology. Our partnership with MQube however has been less than 12 months and is transformational for us. The IDI (Inviting Difference In) Broker Portal will also enable us to move into markets, to use different data sources, and to be able to offer a mortgage to people who would find it very difficult to get one at all.
“By modernising our banking operations and lending decision-making process, alongside our customer and broker facing interfaces, we aim to stand out from the crowd as more people are finding themselves as categorised as non-standard borrowers in the UK.”
“The financial landscape is rapidly evolving, and customers have expectations of seamless, technology-driven financial solutions. Our combination of great people, research, products, and technology will allow us to move in and out of markets to fully support different types of mortgages needs as different demographics change.”
The society has also confirmed it had partnered with LendingMetrics to adopt new auto-assisted underwriting ethnology enabling it to speed up its decision-making process for mortgage applications via intermediaries. The system will also support the development of innovative new propositions enabling them to lend where others may not.
