“We speak about brokers having to be licensed – actually, not [the case],” White said. “The aggregators, the pinnacle group, are taking the final word responsibility to carry the license. Everybody else is registered with the regulator. So the license holder fills out a particular [form] online that really notes who their brokers are.”
The license holder has an obligation to make sure that every thing is functioning appropriately from a fraud, auditing and education standpoint, with ultimate oversight and accountability for anything that happens under their umbrella, White said.
“In all honesty, it’s works rather well,” he said. “We’ve needed to undergo a couple of iterations to get there… And there’s more to come back, all the time more to come back. But the overall framework keeps everybody accountable.”
Foreclosure, power of sale differences also discussed
Unsurprisingly, with rising rates of interest and borrowing costs at play across most markets, the problem of what happens when a borrower encounters difficulty making their monthly payments was also discussed.
In Ireland, Rachel McGovern (pictured immediately below), director of economic services at Brokers Ireland, said a mortgage arrears process put in place by the nation’s central bank is a “lengthy” route deemed problematic by some lenders.
