Equity Release allows homeowners to unlock funds tied up in their property. This has become increasingly popular in recent years with more providers offering this product. As the industry evolves, it’s essential that firms improve their efficiencies to ensure robust customer experiences.
Criterion established its Equity Release API Standards Governance Group in 2021, to oversee the development of Standards for this sector, as well as their ongoing enhancement through change requests.
The Equity Release Quotes and KFI Standard was initially published as Draft Final in 2022, supporting a wide range of medical and lifestyle data used in quotes and KFI scenarios to meet the collective needs of the industry. An industry-standard API build ensures integration consistency and seamless communication, as well as cutting out wasteful redevelopment to save time and costs.
As part of the governance of this group, we received a change request, which indicated that when using this Standard with a sourcing engine partner, there wasn’t enough information in the quote to show the maximum Loan to Value (LTV) and lending limit for each product. This made it impractical for the requestor (sourcing engine) to compare products by LTV or by the maximum available to borrow when the quote request included a specific initial advance and/or cash reserve.
Therefore, we updated the Standard to include two new data items, maximum LTV percentage and maximum amount to borrow, to the calculated results section of any successful or near miss quote responses.
This change was reviewed by the ER Governance Group and this Standard has now been updated from Provisional Build 1 to the Final v1.1 Standard.
