Every mortgage broker CRM promises pipeline, compliance and automation. Very few tell you which client to call this morning. Here is how to evaluate the difference.
A mortgage broker CRM is a system of record: contacts, cases, documents, compliance notes, pipeline stages. Almost every vendor does that competently. The differences that matter show up after settlement or completion, when the CRM has to answer a harder question — what should I do today?
The two jobs people expect from a CRM
- Origination: capture the enquiry, package the case, move it to funded, evidence the advice
- Retention: monitor the funded book, detect repricing and expiry triggers, prompt the next conversation
Most products are built for the first job and market themselves as capable of the second. The test is simple: does the system evaluate your settled clients against live lender pricing, or does it just store the rate you typed in at settlement?
Evaluation criteria that separate vendors
- Data integration — does it read your aggregator, network or lodgement data automatically, or require exports?
- Live pricing — is current market pricing part of the system, or is comparison a manual job?
- Prioritisation — does it output a ranked list of who to contact, or a report you must interpret?
- Compliance evidence — does each review generate a defensible record for Best Interests Duty, FCA suitability or provincial disclosure obligations?
- Adoption cost — how many minutes per day does it demand from someone who is already busy?
"Any tool that needs a manual export to stay current will be abandoned within a quarter. Integration is not a feature, it is the precondition."
Features that sound important but rarely are
- Dashboard breadth — more charts do not produce more calls
- Generic marketing automation you will not have time to configure
- Mobile apps that mirror the desktop rather than support fieldwork
- AI summaries of data you could already see
The right question for every feature is the same: what specific manual task disappears? Deloitte's 2025 broking research attributes the industry's productivity gains to removing manual steps rather than adding reporting surfaces — a 42% rise in average monthly settlements per broker between 2018 and 2024 without proportional headcount growth.
CRM plus monitoring, not CRM instead of it
Replacing an aggregator or network CRM is expensive, disruptive and usually unnecessary. The more effective pattern is to keep the system of record and add a layer that watches the book: fixed-rate and term expiries, clients sitting above current market pricing, clawback or early-repayment windows, equity changes that alter a borrower's options.
That is what Kayotte does. It sits alongside your existing CRM, monitors your settled book continuously, and surfaces a prioritised list of clients worth contacting — with the rationale attached so the conversation and the compliance record are the same piece of work.
Source: Deloitte Access Economics, The Value of Mortgage and Finance Broking 2025, prepared for the MFAA.