You don’t hire underwriters only to have them spend a significant part of their day manually gathering information before they can make any decisions.

Yet before they can get to the work that actually requires their expertise, they can find themselves:

  • Searching for data

  • Moving between systems

  • Checking they have the latest information

  • Pulling together what they need to get started

Most underwriters accept a certain amount of this as part of working life, but there’s a point where preparation stops being part of the job and starts getting in the way of it.

For lenders with strong ambitions to grow, that distinction matters. Skilled expertise becomes difficult to scale when too much of an underwriter’s time is absorbed by work that could be handled more efficiently. And yet, we see exactly that happening.

Take something as routine as a bureau search. The report comes back, but that’s only the start. The underwriter moves between the bureau output and the application, only to find that one of the details doesn’t quite match. Now they’re checking which record is current, going back through the application and cross-referencing another source before they can move forward.

This is slow, manual work being carried out by someone whose time should be focused on assessing risk and making decisions. And it isn’t an isolated problem. 80% of senior UK lending professionals we surveyed experience data friction, showing just how widespread the challenge of accessing and working with data has become.*

None of those individual steps sounds particularly significant, but repeat them across every application, every day, and the impact quickly adds up. You’re consuming valuable underwriting capacity before the underwriting has even begun.

That might be manageable at today’s volumes, but it isn’t a sustainable way to grow.

The market isn't going to wait for you to catch up.


Asset finance is changing, and the demands placed on underwriting teams are changing with it. Lenders are responding to new opportunities and changing requirements, while brokers and applicants increasingly expect quicker answers.

When volumes increase, the administrative work surrounding every decision naturally increases with them. If your underwriters are already spending too much of their day gathering and reconciling information, more business doesn't simply mean more opportunity. It means more pressure on the same finite capacity.

That creates a real commercial risk. A lender can have the appetite to grow and the expertise to make good decisions, but neither counts for much if the operation can't keep pace with the opportunities coming through the door. At that point, this stops being a question of operational efficiency. Your decisioning process can become the very thing holding growth back.

Give expertise room to work


The answer isn’t simply to ask underwriters to work faster. It’s to look at how much of the work around a decision actually needs their involvement, and where technology can take some of that workload away. Freeing up that capacity can help lenders make decisions faster and grow volumes without needing underwriting resource to increase at the same rate.

For me, this is where connected, assisted decisioning becomes important. Technology can bring the relevant internal and external data together, automate repeatable checks and give underwriters a clearer view of the application without asking them to search for it themselves.

That doesn’t mean taking the decision out of their hands. Particularly in asset finance, there will always be cases where experience and judgement matter. Assisted decisioning should give underwriters the information they need and the capacity to focus on those cases, while keeping them in control of the final decision.

Can your underwriters see every relevant input without searching across systems? If the answer is no, it’s worth questioning where valuable time is being spent.

Technology shouldn’t take the decision away from the underwriter. It should remove the unnecessary workload surrounding it.

Explore the future of asset finance decisioning


Connected decisioning is just one part of the picture. Our executive guide explores five characteristics shaping the future of asset finance decisioning, helping lenders identify friction, improve control and focus expertise where it adds the most value.

Discover what Connected, Fast, Adaptable, Intelligent and Controlled decisioning could mean for your lending operation.

 

*Figures based on independent industry research conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of LendingMetrics, surveying 250 senior UK lending professionals responsible for influencing or making decisions around credit strategy. Research conducted July–August 2026.