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Find out more How Open Banking is reshaping mortgage lending at Leeds Building Society
Overview: How Open Banking is reshaping mortgage lending at Leeds Building Society
A modern mortgage journey – Results that speak for themselves
Experian’s mission is to help lenders integrate digital mortgage journeys to drive automation, speed up decisions, and support financial inclusion – giving consumers more control and support.
Since 1875, Leeds Building Society has focused on putting homeownership within reach of more people, especially for first-time buyers. Recently, it began a digital transformation to streamline mortgage applications and improve credit decisioning using new data sources. Central to this is Leeds Building Society’s partnership with Experian, further evolving the automation in the mortgage landscape through the integration of Experian’s Open Banking Service, for seamless bank statement retrieval and underwriter assessments.
We explore the challenges faced and the collaborative journey with Experian to create a modern, consumer-focused mortgage experience in an increasingly competitive digital marketplace.
Challenge overview
Leeds Building Society’s underwriters are often tasked with reviewing manual bank statements. The receipt of the manual statement can often add days to application decision making. This slowed processes and underwriter decision making capacity on the document, which can fall short of consumer expectations for instant feedback.
Applicants with limited credit histories often have reduced data availability, so the opportunity to embed an Open Banking experience into a seamless digital mortgage journey further cemented the Society’s vision of adopting this new approach to be the go-to provider for first time buyers.
Challenges
- Time taken to review manual bank statements
- Reduced data availability
- Complex mortgage journeys
View Leeds Building Society Profile
Company Bio:
Leeds Building Society is a building society based in Leeds, England. It serves approximately 900,000 customers across the United Kingdom, who together hold £9.9 billion in savings balances and is the fifth largest building society in the UK. It has 51 branches across the UK.
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|---|---|
| Established: | 1875 |
| Number of customers: | 900,000+ |
| Number of employees: | 1,500+ |
Working with Experian has enabled us to modernise our mortgage journey, reduce processing times, and better support the society’s purpose through smarter, data-driven decisioning.
Solution overview
In the last 5 years, to deliver growth in automation, Leeds Building Society has focused on transitioning mortgage decisioning into a modern platform with the Society’s adoption of Experian’s PowerCurve platform to automate Decisions in Principle processes. By integrating affordability rules, ID and fraud checks, credit risk decisioning and analytics, Decisions in Principle turnaround dropped from 24 hours to only 11 seconds for eligible cases – automating 80% of the journey. Encouraged by this, the Society became the first UK lender to adopt Experian Boost in May 2023, allowing applicants to share Open Banking data (e.g., utility payments) to improve credit scores. With applicants seeing a score uplift, expanding access without negative impact on others.
This success led to a focus on improving affordability assessments through data-driven decisioning.
Measuring early consumer adoption and broker engagement
We partnered with Leeds Building Society to focus on embedding Open Banking into the mortgage process using Experian’s Affordability Passport. This replaced manual statements with electronic retrieval, reducing delays from days to hours and improving underwriter efficiency through data transaction categorisation.
Launched in January 2025, after internal trialling in direct channels, with a major broker, the pilot exceeded expectations. About 50% of sole applicants clicked through to provide Open Banking consent – well above the 10% expected. Of those, 95% completed the process.
Statement retrieval dropped from four days to minutes. The electronic statements familiar format and categorisation helps to aid the underwriter reviews, which can reduce manual review time. Broker feedback was also positive, with fewer document requests and faster case progression, which has supported the Society to broaden the rollout.
With Open Banking embedded, the Society is now looking to further automate the reviewal of documents by highlighting positive behaviours in account conduct, using Experian’s transaction data. Once validated, these will be added to Experian PowerCurve to auto-approve low-risk cases, freeing underwriters to focus on complex cases.
This multi-phase collaboration shows Experian’s continued investment and innovation in combining Credit Bureau and Open Banking decisioning.
Discover the value of an integrated, user-centric, digital approach for mortgage applications.
Find out more about Affordability Passport
Results
- Decision in principal dropped from 24 hours to 11 seconds
- Automation of 80% of application journey
- About 50% of sole applicants clicked through to provide Open Banking consent
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