Work on Application in Principle (AIP) standards will be completed thereafter.

Standardising these business processes will result in many benefits for the industry by reducing the amount of re-keying across all parties, allowing intermediaries to meet compliance demands through lender sourced KFIs, helping reduce admin processing costs and ultimately increasing sales.

What's more, KFIs will be obtained instantly and applications turned around quicker, resulting in better customer service and process completion times.

Final deliverables on the standards include:

• Business requirements documentation
• Process models
• Service design documents
• Implementation documentation, including XML schemas, business rules implementation and sample XML

The eMortgage Forum - the intermediaries, and lenders, involved in the mortgage standards initiative - has agreed that the standards should be made widely available to any lender, intermediary firm, packager or technology supplier in the sector. Lenders will continue to fund Origo's work, and this will be extended to include any lender wishing to use the standards.

"Interoperability of systems between parties in the mortgage sector is vital for ensuring greater business benefits for everyone," commented Paul Pettitt, managing director of Origo. "Intermediaries have the desire to use more eservices and lenders and technology providers have made great progress in developing new services and technologies to meet their needs. The standards being developed are just the starting point to further advancing the eservices landscape and ensuring that systems are better linked. We're inviting any interested parties to get in touch if they want to use the standards or get involved in the initiative itself."