16/10/2026
Do you know what CVM in banking terms is and how this is affecting you?
This is a little long but please read it and send your response to the question at the end.
Its 11pm on any night of the week and you are sitting on your sofa with your mobile.
Your bank has sent you a message. It’s noticed your current account balance has dropped below its usual level three months running. It’s noticed your mortgage payment now takes up more of your income than it did. You haven’t missed anything. You haven’t rung anyone. You haven’t told a soul that things have got tight.
The message offers to extend your mortgage term. The new payment is already modelled. It’s £180 per month lower.
Four clicks and it’s done; nine years added to your mortgage that now runs past your 68th birthday. No conversation about retirement income. No protection review. No suitability letter. Nobody asked you why the money got tight — which, had anyone bothered, would have turned up a £14,000 credit card that was the actual problem.
You were my client. I placed that mortgage in 2024. I handled it properly and I didn’t know this was happening.
This is not a prediction. McKinsey published the blueprint for it and gave it a name so dull you’d walk straight past it: customer value management (CVM).
Three letters that sound like a middle-management department. It’s the most serious commercial threat to the mortgage intermediary and it’s happening under everyone’s noses.
Two more, before you decide this is overstated
A payment to a local architect, then a planning application fee to the council. The banks AI engine works out you are extending your house and offers a further advance on your existing mortgage before you’re finished getting quotes. You weren’t shopping for finance yet but now you are and there’s only one lender in the room.
It happened between a card transaction and a notification.
The one that should really worry you: A nursery direct debit stops. A salary goes up. A savings balance climbs for 11 months and then plateaus. The AI engine reads that as a family getting ready to move and starts a sequence — affordability, agreement in principle, here’s your budget — nine months before you’ve spoken to an estate agent, never mind me your broker. By the time you would normally have seen someone, you’ve already been told what you can borrow by your bank.
The bank isn’t waiting for the you to enter the market. It’s identifying you before you are in it.
Every high street lender already holds the data to run all three of these. What they’ve lacked is the machinery and that’s what’s being built now.
Hundreds of triggers at once. A balance that dips three months running. A salary that jumps. A form somebody abandoned halfway. At full automation, the engine reaches 80-100% of customers, across every product the bank sells, 3-5 times per week. New campaign live in two days. Every message sent is written by artificial intelligence (AI).
They know 3-5 is safe because opt-outs don’t start until about one per day. So those three scenarios aren’t a queue. They’re happening at the same time, to different clients, every week.
And the reason is simple. Banks have spent around $600bn per year on technology and gone backwards.
The average European customer now banks with 2.6 institutions, up from two in 2021, and half of them hold exactly one product with any given bank. So, 69% now say their priority is organic growth through better development of existing customers.
Translated: we’ve already got you. We just need to sell you more.
There’s one sentence in that report that stands out. McKinsey found that a digital-first sales approach significantly boosts sales across most retail banking products — with mortgages as the only notable exception.
The mortgage is the one product digital hasn’t cracked: too complicated, too emotional, too much money. People want a human being when they’re borrowing £300,000, and no amount of hyper personalisation has changed that yet. But the only notable exception isn’t a permanent condition. It’s an open item on somebody’s roadmap, and a very large number of extremely well-funded people are working on closing it.
What happens in the meantime. Banks don’t beat me on advice. They won’t have the term extension conversation properly. They won’t ask why your money got tight. They won’t find the credit card. The thing is they don’t need to beat me on advice.
They’ll get to you first, more often, with something useful, until I’m the person you will have to try to remember. I won’t lose you in a competitive process. I’ll lose you to convenience.
You may think so what?
I am not going to out-technology a bank, so I have stopped thinking about that. The engine sees what you have spent. It doesn’t see what you are worried about. It doesn’t know your mum’s not well, and you are thinking about moving closer. It doesn’t know your business is worth more than the accounts say. It can’t know, because none of that goes through a card reader.
That’s the gap. It’s a good one. But it only exists if someone’s actually asking.
Here’s what bothers me about all this: a regulated piece of advice happened on a sofa at 11pm at night, and the only party in the room was the one selling.
That’s why brokers exist. Do you think those questions have a value?
