My mother and father have their birthday on the same day which, in theory, should make it easy not to forget their birthday each year. Until two years ago that was the case but for the last two years I haven’t got a birthday card on time to them. Last year was down to my own brain ageing and slowing down but this year it was due to the postal strike. With my parents barely speaking to me now I can’t afford to miss next year’s birthday so I am going electronic and abandoning the Royal Mail.

With a backlog of £350m of mortgage deals lost in the post for over a week due to the recent action, brokers and clients are feeling similar pain. Of course the pain goes beyond mortgages to all classes of financial business but as mortgages are often so time critical the pain here is extremely tangible.

However electronic processing of mortgage new business has taken off in the last few years and the systems supporting this trend are getting ever more comprehensive. It is no longer about electronic form processing as lenders are frequently accepting electronic copies of the supporting documentation(either faxed or e-mailed).

The postal strike will have forced many brokers to use these services either for the first time ever or the first time for a while. It will be interesting to see if these brokers then go back to paper or embrace the new electronic world to avoid problems and delays in the future. My gut feeling is that like myself with birthday cards, I am sure the recent strikes will cause many to abandon traditional, paper routes and move electronic – the biggest loser in this – The Royal Mail and their workers.

One of the most important aspects in any procurement is choosing the right partner. One way to help differentiate between vendors is to use the quadrants below to compare companies against their vision and their delivery capability.

Many organisations exist in the bottom right hand corner, high on deliver capability but low on vision. In many case this is not a bad place to select a vendor from, as long as the vision can be brought in from elsewhere, either within the distributor or from other external sources. Often, but certainly not always, this delivery security comes at a price as these organisations tend to resource projects heavily so secure success and this often puts the price out of reach of many distributors.

Other vendors exist in the top left. Again vendors from this quadrant have their place as their vision can provide a real differentiator to a distributor. However the price here is risk. Choosing vendors in this box needs to be the domain of organisations that have the delivery procedures to drive and control the project and the business resilience to cope with delays as the project hits the inevitable bumps in the delivery road.

Organisations in the bottom left hand quadrant need little mention here – simply avoid them. Why take the delivery risk if there is no vision to give any commercial advantage. The top right hand quadrant is of course the ideal place to select vendor from but the key is how to spot these, although tracking the life cycle of organisations can provide some clues.

New entrants often enter the market full of vision but with little deliver experience. As they engage the market the vision increases as does their delivery capability until they enter the Dream Team Quadrant for that all too short period of time. As they achieve success they meet deliver issues and support issues and often spend less time looking to the future, while their legacy software and customer base becomes harder to move towards the future needs even if the company can spot them. These challenges soon drag the vendor out of the visionary space.

Once the vendor is in the bottom right hand quadrant the direction the company takes will depend on the strength of the management and indeed business model. Strong companies will re-energise and move back into the dream team world, through recruiting expertises and in effect buying more capacity while also launching new products. However the danger is weaker companies hit more and more delivery issues and don’t invest to get off of the slippery slope into the bottom left hand quadrant.

It doesn’t seem that long ago since the number of ‘specialist’ sub-prime lenders was a growing breed attracted by the high margins that could be made from ever more risky lending. A few of these lenders broadened their portfolio to spread the risk, but those that didn’t have been disappearing faster than the light evenings. In addition, those traditional lenders who offered sub-prime, or high LTV and income multiples have also withdrawn rather hurriedly. So the pendulum has swung from what some would argue was a reckless lending policy, to what may now be the other extreme.

With sub-prime interest rates on the increase, the inevitable repossessions are following. Who is to blame, the borrowers who should have known better, or the lenders who have been accused of ‘jumping on the bandwagon’. The real problem is that the effect will resonate into the wider economy – even the Chancellor is scaling down the growth expectations for UK plc. The pendulum will eventually return to a more considered central position – in time… but will the situation be repeated in future? The age old lesson of ‘if it looks too good to be true it probably is [was]’ will probably resonate in a few lender board rooms – for while at least.