Curvestone and OMS: compliance checking for every mortgage case

Ask a network compliance lead what proportion of new business their team actually reviews, and the honest answers are uncomfortable. One supervision head at a national adviser network told us this year they were "literally getting to about five percent of new business, which is nowhere near where we need it to be". He is not an outlier. He is just more candid than most.

That gap is not laziness. A proper file review takes hours, adviser numbers keep growing, and compliance headcount does not scale with them. So the industry settled into a trade-off: review everything as your adviser base grows, and go broke, or sample-check and hope for the best. Risk managed statistically is risk hoped about, not risk managed.

I have argued before that this trade-off shouldn't exist. In April we got to retire it in practice. One Mortgage System (OMS) switched on our compliance case checking inside its mortgage case journey, and TMG Mortgage Network and Connect Mortgages went live first. The first cases are now through, which is why I am writing this weeks later rather than on announcement day. The interesting part was never the press release.

The interesting part is what the deployment model proves.

Mortgage compliance doesn't have a technology problem; it has a deployment problem. A checking tool brokers must log into separately will always under-deliver. Coverage only reaches 100% when the check runs inside the case journey itself.

Every mortgage case submitted in OMS now gets read, classified and cross-referenced against the firm's compliance checklist before the case checker opens the file. That covers the whole evidential bundle: fact finds, income evidence, bank statements, identification, suitability letters and the supporting paperwork around them.

The system surfaces missing documents, data mismatches, suitability gaps and regulatory exceptions directly to the firm's compliance case checker, inside the OMS interface they already use. There is no additional system to learn and no change to how brokers work. A broker submits a case exactly as they did in March. The difference is that every submission now arrives with the checking already done.

Two design choices matter as much as the checking itself. First, every check produces a full audit trail: what was reviewed, what was found, and the basis for each finding. Second, we built the checking through active engagement with the FCA's Innovation programme, because explainability is not a feature you retrofit once a regulator asks. An output you cannot explain is an output you cannot defend, whatever its accuracy.

TMG and Connect are not pilots on synthetic files. They are live firms, with real cases flowing through, as trade press covered at the time.

For two years, networks weighing this problem have heard the same two answers. Wait for your CRM's roadmap to grow a compliance module, or bolt a specialist portal onto the side of your process. Both answers quietly cost you coverage.

The standalone portal fails on human behaviour, not capability. A separate login means re-keying, and re-keying means the check happens late, partially, or not at all. A compliance tool brokers have to log into separately is a compliance tool brokers will route around. Nobody designed that outcome. It is simply what busy people do with second systems.

The build-it-ourselves route fails on economics. I respect the instinct, and some large networks have real engineering teams. But an in-house checking system is typically a twelve-to-eighteen-month build that encodes yesterday's checklist, then needs maintaining every time a lender or regulator moves. That is a permanent product team, funded from a compliance budget.

Neal Jannels, managing director of OMS, framed the alternative well in the announcement: "Compliance should support brokers, not slow them down – and by embedding Curvestone's capability directly into the OMS case journey, every submitted case gets reviewed to a consistent standard, with issues flagged to the case checker immediately."

That is the dilemma dissolved rather than answered. The specialist check arrived inside the CRM the intermediary market already uses. I have written before about why oversight has to come before speed in AI mortgage compliance; this integration is where that argument meets the workflow.

The first live firms are not cutting reviewers. They are moving them from page-turning to judgement.

Liz Syms, CEO of Connect for Intermediaries, described the shift on their live cases: "Working with Curvestone, we are starting to see the system compress what has traditionally been a two-to-three-hour file review into minutes. That ultimately frees our file reviewers to concentrate on higher-skilled work such as the feedback and coaching that genuinely raises adviser standards."

Compliance teams have always drawn a line between two kinds of checking. Completeness asks whether the file contains everything it should, evidenced and consistent. Suitability asks whether the advice was right. The first is exhaustive, mechanical and crushing at volume. The second is where a good reviewer earns their seat. Automate the first properly and the second finally gets the attention it deserves, on every case rather than a sampled few.

The machine reads every page. The human holds every decision. Findings surface to the firm's own case checker, who applies judgement where it matters most, with the audit trail recording both the finding and the call.

Scott Thorpe, TMG's founder and CEO, put the intent bluntly: "We are going all in on AI, not to replace people, but to free up resource so we can invest even more time into training, development and helping our members grow." A network that reviews every case to a consistent standard also has a different conversation with its board, and with its PI insurer, than one extrapolating from a sample.

The integration is now rolling out to all OMS clients: bespoke compliance checklists for larger firms, and a standard configuration available immediately for smaller ones. Bespoke matters more than it sounds. The checklist being enforced is your compliance policy, not a generic rulebook someone else wrote.

The pattern generalises well beyond two networks. Origination keeps getting faster everywhere, and checking has to live inside whatever system the case flows through, or it becomes the bottleneck that speed just routes around. For firms still evidencing outcomes from a sample, that question lands quickly, and it is the same one the regulator asks: when the FCA comes asking, can you show your files stand up?

The sample-or-go-broke trade-off was never a law of nature. It was a limit of where checking used to live. The first networks through this integration prove the ceiling moved: every case, checked to one standard, with the evidence to show for it, and no second system for brokers to resent.

If you run compliance for a network, or your cases already flow through OMS, talk to us about switching the checks on. Thirty minutes, your case shape, no slides.