Nicola Firth was a mortgage broker for 13 years, first as an appointed representative and then as a directly authorised broker. She ran her own brokerage for seven years. It was a frustration for her as a broker, finding the best rate for a client but then discovering the lender wouldn’t accept the criteria – and neither would the next lender on the list or even the one after that. This meant spending hours and even days trying to place cases. It was this which led her to found Knowledge Bank, the UK’s first criteria search system.

After 18 months of testing and development Knowledge Bank launched officially in September 2017. It has now grown to be the largest database of mortgage lending criteria held in the UK serving thousands of brokers and lenders across seven different lending types, including residential, buy-to-let, second charges, equity release, self-build, bridging and commercial and winning 28 prestigious industry awards for the technology.