I can hardly believe we’re nine months into this year! It doesn’t feel like five minutes since we were all talking about what 2026 might hold, and here we are planning for 2027.

It’s been a year shaped much more by what happened outside our market than inside it. Q1 was busy and confident. Then Q2 turned, and it turned fast. Conflict in the Middle East pushed energy prices up, inflation expectations followed, and the rate outlook was repriced from cuts to rises almost overnight. Swaps moved daily and lenders changed direction more than once.

I know what that meant for you. Answers that changed between the fact-find and the application. Clients ringing in a panic. Rates secured earlier and more often than in any normal year, because that was the only way to protect people from the noise. It was hard work, and I’m not sure it got the credit it deserved.

The maturity wave never went away, though, and Q3 has been about converting it — keeping business on your books and rebroking where it’s right for the client. It’s been quieter, and you’ll have felt it. Buying activity in August ran around 10% below last year, and the Lloyds index recorded the first annual price fall since November 2023.

But if your pipeline feels nothing like a firm two counties over, that’s because it isn’t. Scotland, the North and the Midlands are still rising, Northern Ireland by 6.9%, while London and the commuter belt have gone the other way, with asking prices down 4.4% in a single month. Central London flats are the sharpest example of all. Where you write business matters more this year than it has for a while.

A quieter summer isn’t all bad, either. I hope it gave you some time to spend with family and friends, and a bit of headspace to think about your own personal ventures rather than helping everyone else with theirs.

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Market update

Bank Rate has been at 3.75% since late 2025 and was held again on 30 July, though the 6–3 vote told its own story, with three members pushing for 4%. The latest decision on 17 September for a further hold came as something of a surprise, with pricing leaning towards a rise over the coming year.

Here’s the part that matters for your clients: a hold on Bank Rate doesn’t mean a hold on fixed rates. Two- and five-year fixes climbed back to around 5.6% at the start of August after lenders reversed their July cuts on swap volatility, and the average SVR is 7.13%. So, the client drifting towards maturity, assuming not much has changed, is the client who needs a call.

The bigger pressure is coming from gilts. Thirty-year yields hit 5.89% in early September, the highest since 1998, and the government is now paying more to borrow long-term than at any point since the Debt Management Office was set up.

That has roughly halved the Chancellor’s headroom, to about £13bn, almost all of it through higher debt interest. The Budget on 28 October will tell us whether the room exists to deliver them. This isn’t just politics for us: fixed rates are priced off gilts and swaps, so the same pressure ends up in your clients’ monthly payments. Worth mentioning to anyone waiting for rates to fall before they act.

Looking ahead, the 2027 maturity profile is just as big and the competition for it will be harder. Lenders are investing heavily in AI and in their own direct channels, and more business is going direct as a result.

That’s the honest risk to your back book, and it’s why contact strategy is the one thing I’d encourage you to look at before January — knowing exactly when each client’s deal ends and being the first person to help. If you’d like help building a contact plan around your data, that’s precisely what we’re here for.

Your clients are turning up differently too. AI hasn’t slowed down — August set a record for new model releases — so more people arrive at a first appointment having already researched rates, affordability and products, genuinely believing they’re well prepared. Sometimes they are.

Often what they’ve been given is confidently wrong, out of date, or missing the criteria detail that decides the case. It changes where your value sits: less about holding the information, more about testing it and turning it into something they can act on. None of us has fully worked out what that means for fact-finds, evidencing advice or fees, and I’d like to keep talking about it with you.

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Supporting firms to grow

Our events programme starts with a question about your business rather than ours and runs at venues across the country so you can pick a date and place that works for you.

Protection Masterclasses

The protection gap is still the biggest unmet need and the opportunity is widening. From 6 April 2027 most unused pension funds fall within the scope of inheritance tax, which turns an estate planning conversation into a protection one — cover written in trust can give beneficiaries the liquidity to pay a bill they’d otherwise find from the estate. That’s a real reason to go back to clients you haven’t spoken to in a while.

We’re bringing new partners into these sessions too, and yes, they get into the uncomfortable questions — your conversion rate, where opportunities are slipping — because that’s usually where the growth is hiding.

Specialist Lending Unlocked

If the purchase market is quiet where you are, this is where to look. The specialist market is growing several times faster than mainstream residential and is often countercyclical to it — a genuine way to diversify your income rather than ride the cycle. We cover the cases that make underwriters pause — adverse credit, irregular or multiple incomes, property that’s hard to lend against — and put you in front of the lenders who write this business.

Mortgage & Protection Live

Our flagship events; key partners and industry experts in the room with you. From October our CII-accredited Wealth Development Days do the same for wealth firms, covering market developments and the regulatory horizon. And if you’ve been thinking about moving into wealth but haven’t taken the first step, come and talk to advisers who already have.

It’s free to attend, and the full programme can be found here.

Being a Proactive Partner for Life — helping you start, run, grow and eventually exit your business — is what sits behind all of it, and it’s why we’d rather build something around your firm than hand you a standard package.

If what you need isn’t on the agenda, please just ask.

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Listening to you

With so much going on both externally and within the business, keeping the needs of advisers at the forefront of our plans is an ongoing priority. We do this in several ways, including through our feedback survey, which we send out twice a year.

Thank you to everyone who took part in H1 and shared your views. The results showed that we have a lot to be proud of as a business, with a Net Promoter Score of +55, but also gave us a view of the areas we need to focus on to meet your needs even better.

We’ll be asking for your feedback again in H2, so please look out for your invite to take part in the survey, which launches in October.

By regularly checking in, we can make sure we’re heading in the right direction and focusing on the things that really matter to you.

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Technology

I’ve carried on writing about the technology questions that keep coming up in conversations with you. July’s piece for Mortgage Solutions made the case for holding our technology choices more lightly than we used to.

August’s looked at the FCA’s position on AI, which is being handled through Consumer Duty and SM&CR rather than a new regime, so there’s no playbook coming that’s worth waiting for.

A third, for IFA Magazine, looked at how the next generation is finding and choosing mortgage advice. The response was kinder than I expected, mostly on the practical points: keep support tasks separate from advice decisions, be rigorous with client data under UK GDPR, and remember that accountability stays with you, not the tool.

On our own technology, in September we announced a strategic partnership with JammJar to push on with the development of OneView. We’ll be working with them to bring their AI and data capability into the platform, so case data turns into insight you can use — problems flagged early, cases kept moving and less manual chasing.

Alongside that we’re running a full review agnostic review of our CRM proposition and I’m looking forward to sharing where that lands in Q4.

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Beyond the day job

In August, a team of eight of us from SBG headed to Celtic Manor in south Wales for our first Charity Golf Day in support of the Little Green Sock Project, with advisers, providers and lenders all together for the day.

For those of you who haven’t heard me mention LGSP before, they’re our UK charity partner for 2026 and are based close to our Greater Manchester headquarters. LGSP is a small charity that puts together bundles of new and pre-loved children’s essentials — toiletries, clothing and safety equipment like stair gates — for families in poverty or crisis, including single parents, those fleeing domestic abuse, and others struggling to afford basic necessities.

Between the auction, raffle, golden tickets and everything raised around the course, we raised £5,288, which means we’ve now raised over £10,000 since January — phenomenal figures.

The number matters, but so does the setting — a genuinely different way to spend time with people we usually see across a table. We’ll be doing it again in 2027, and I’d love to see more of you there.

Thank you for the business you’ve placed with us this year, and for being straight with us when things haven’t gone as they should. If you’d like to talk about your firm — where it is now, where you’re taking it, and what you need from us — make sure you reach out – we are here to help you.