In its coverage of our Mortgage Trends 2026 report, InFinance highlights a structural turning point in the Dutch mortgage market that aligns closely with our vision: decision speed is becoming the decisive competitive factor. We show that in an intermediary-driven, highly competitive landscape, the lender that can deliver a clear “yes” or “no” fastest increasingly wins the customer—regardless of a sharp rate or product proposition.
Our analysis reveals that many lenders still need 9 to 14 working days to reach a final approval. While the digital front end of the journey (orientation, onboarding, document upload) is largely in good shape, the real bottleneck sits at the heart of the credit process: acceptance. Manual document checks, repeated rekeying of data, and human interpretation of complex credit policies remain the norm. This becomes especially painful in more complex cases—such as multiple income streams, sustainability measures, or policy exceptions—where roughly 20–30% of applications drive a disproportionate share of workload and lead time, leaving acceptance teams under sustained pressure. We also point out that AI could significantly improve efficiency, but its broader deployment is being held back not by technology, but by governance and regulatory questions around the EU AI Act, explainability, data quality, and human oversight.
The coverage underscores our central message: lenders that fail to structurally improve decision speed risk losing competitiveness, no matter how attractive their price or product. For stakeholders across the mortgage value chain, this is a clear call to move from front-end digitisation to deep process transformation in credit decisioning.
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