Interview with Lorenzo Tejada-Orrell, Chief Innovation Officer, CLSQ

The Intermediary spoke with Lorenzo Tejada-Orrell, chief innovation officer at CLSQ, about how he works with lenders, what makes CLSQ different, and homebuying trends to watch out for in the future.

What is your role at CLSQ?

I have the privilege of a varied role that stretches right across the group, covering innovation, new opportunities and overall strategic direction of CLSQ. My main role is to understand what we need to do as a business to pivot and adapt to the market, both in terms of internal stakeholders and working with our external partners. Essentially, it’s about taking a concept, making it a reality and shaping our commercial vision.

My core background is entrepreneurial, and so my unique skills and experience are very much focused around developing an idea to generate revenue and, at CLSQ, client and partner engagement forms a big part of this. We work in close partnership with our clients to understand what they want and how we can adapt our approach to deliver this.

What do you offer to lenders that is different to other data and technology providers?

It can easily be summarised in three words – identify, analyse and de-risk.

The vast majority of organisations deal with only one of these – they may offer data services, for example, or insurance. However, at CLSQ, we provide an end-to-end service that takes industry-leading raw data, analyse and provide clear next steps or in fact insurance to allow the transaction to proceed forward.

This means our clients have the certainty they need to proceed with confidence, and they are able to achieve this by working with one provider, rather than three. This makes the whole process much more streamlined and straightforward.

What do you have planned for the rest of the year?

The CLSQ Portal, which was released around this time last year, is a geospatial platform aggregating more than 800 property datasets, from flood and stability hazards to EPC and planning, streamlining the property due diligence process into a user-friendly application. It’s already award winning, and we are continuing to add new products to the platform.

We have recently launched Augmented Property Verification Service (APVS), which identifies title risks, planning and other perils early in the mortgage process and protects the lender against costs and losses for the life of the mortgage.

Alongside this, Verify, an industry first data-driven insurance that empowers lenders to make instant mortgage decisions with confidence, whilst also mitigating capital risk, by verifying a property’s valuation. When the policy criteria is met, the lender is then insured against losses on the outstanding loan amount if the property is repossessed. A truly revolutionary product within the financial sector.

The combination of Verify and APVS enables lenders to streamline their automated mortgage decisions than ever before, reducing friction in the process and delivering an enhanced customer experience. At the same time lenders have the peace of mind that they are protected by AA- insurance.

These products have the power to transform the market – and with our user-friendly Portal and easy-to-implement APIs, lenders can start realising the benefits to their originations processes and risk management.

Why do you think it’s particularly important in the current environment for lenders to make use of data in this way?

The ability to understand the risk associated with a property at the most critical point of a transaction empowers lenders to enhance the triage process and to work more efficiently and effectively. It means underwriters can focus their attention on cases that are more likely to complete and ultimately reduces wasted time and money.

Given the current operating environment, we think this is something that has to be a high priority for all lenders.

Looking ahead, what trends do you expect to see in the mortgage market?

Ultimately, the homebuying process will only see significant improvement if there is more joined information exchange between lenders, brokers, surveyors, conveyancers and consumers.

My role at CLSQ is to adapt our insights, knowledge and capability to help our lender partners, but we think there are much greater downstream benefits to doing this, enabling a single source of truth that can be used by every stakeholder in a property transaction for the ultimate benefit of the customer.

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This interview was published in The Intermediary