472 mortgage products disappeared in 48 hours this month (Moneyfacts). Lenders who'd been cutting rates reversed course overnight. The Bank of England's next move went from near-certain cut to near-certain hold. If that feels familiar, it should: COVID, the mini-budget, the 2023 inflation spike, the autumn budget, and now Iran — five major direction changes since 2020. In this first issue of Market Watch, we make the case that this isn't a crisis. It's the new operating rhythm. Why it's happening, why it probably isn't stopping, and what brokers can practically do about it.
The pattern: Five mass withdrawal events since 2020. A phenomenon that didn't exist before. What's changed structurally, and why it probably isn't going back.
The gap that matters: Most brokers understood what was happening this month. The difference was whether their setup let them act on it fast enough, for every client.
Three practical questions to stress-test your readiness: monitor, triage, respond, with specific actions for solo brokers and larger firms.
Market sweep: Services inflation (the number the MPC is actually watching) and the second-charge boom hitting an 18-year high.
Volatility Is the New Normal
Stability Was the Exception, Not the Rule
One number reframes everything: in the 1980s, the Bank of England changed its base rate 89 times. In the entire 2010s, it changed it zero times. The 2020s so far have seen 22 changes, closer to the 1990s (~27) than either extreme. That decade of stillness was the anomaly. What's genuinely new is the mass product withdrawal — before COVID, lenders didn't pull hundreds of products overnight. Then it started happening regularly:
April 2020 — 462 products pulled in a single day. Record-breaking at the time (Moneyfacts).
September 2022 — 935 in one day after the mini-budget. 40% of the entire market gone within days (Moneyfacts, LBC).
May–July 2023 — 373+ pulled in a single week. Product shelf life hit a record low of 12 days (Moneyfacts Year in Review).
October–November 2024 — The biggest monthly product drop since July 2023, with shelf life falling to 17 days post-budget (Moneyfacts Group).
March 2026 — 472 pulled in 48 hours after the Iran/oil shock. Moneyfacts called it "the most turbulent since the mini-budget" (Moneyfacts, via PropertyWire).
Swap rates now move in a week what used to take a year. Since late 2023, the market has completely changed its mind about where rates are heading five times (BoE MPC minutes, February 2026; Mortgage Introducer poll, March 2026). Can your setup absorb this without every shock becoming a fire drill?
We're Probably Not Going Back
Huw Pill, the Bank of England's chief economist, put a name to this last October: the "NASTY" era (his acronym for Not As Tranquil Years). The pace of global economic change, he said, is "increasing rather than diminishing" (BoE speech, October 2025). The Bank's own chief economist is telling you the old normal isn't coming back.
Why doesn't it calm down between crises? Because the underlying drivers are structural, not event-driven. Take energy. Europe switched from Russian pipeline gas to buying on the global market, so UK energy costs now move with weather events in Texas, shipping disruptions in the Red Sea, and competition from Asian buyers. Gas price volatility in 2024 was still 50% above the pre-2020 average, and prices are roughly double where they were before (IEA). That's a new floor. Rate surprises driven by energy are likely to keep coming.
Then trade. Policy uncertainty hit record highs in January 2025 (BoE Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden, February 2025). The US tariff regime has been rewritten twice in two months after the Supreme Court struck down the original legal basis in February (NBC News, CNBC). The Bank for International Settlements warns that this stop-start approach to trade policy is making economies more sensitive to shocks: when the next one hits, the inflation response is likely to be bigger, and the Bank of England's response will need to be sharper (BIS Annual Report 2025). In practice: shorter product shelf lives, less warning before repricing events.
And geopolitics barely needs a summary. Iran, the Ukraine aftermath, defence spending at Cold War levels. Chatham House's December 2025 assessment was blunt: "global security continued to unravel." The Iran conflict isn't a one-off. It's the latest in a sequence that keeps adding new entries, and each one plays out the same way operationally: products move, clients need answers, and the window to act keeps shrinking.
"The drivers of the Great Moderation — the long period of low inflation and stable growth that defined the 1990s through 2010s — may be unwinding."
Catherine Mann, BoE MPC member, November 2024. Mann is the committee's most hawkish voice — but the structural argument she's making here is shared more widely.
If there's a historical parallel, it's the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not the rate levels. The rhythm. That era averaged about five rate changes a year, with repeated reversals: up, down, up again. A string of shocks that sound oddly familiar: a property boom, a currency crisis, a government U-turn that rocked the markets. Nobody knew which way rates were going next (BoE Bank Rate database).
The difference is that brokers in the early 1990s dealt with this uncertainty using telephones and paper. They couldn't see what was happening in real time, let alone act on it. The tools exist now. The rhythm is familiar; the ability to respond to it is not.
The OBR's March 2026 forecast has inflation falling to 2.3% by end-2026 and growth recovering from 2027 (OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, March 2026). Global gas supply is expanding fast, which should take some of the heat out of energy prices by 2030 (IEA). And history offers comfort: volatile periods have ended before. If Iran de-escalates and services inflation finally cracks, the Bank of England has room to start cutting again in the second half of this year.
I think the balance of evidence points the other way, but I'd rather show the working than campaign for a position. The shocks since 2020 are interconnected: energy, trade, and geopolitics all feeding into each other, against a backdrop of longer-term shifts (deglobalisation, ageing populations, climate costs) that weren't present in previous recoveries. The optimists might be right about where inflation is heading, and the volatility thesis might still hold. The point isn't that rates will stay high for ever. It's that the calm predictability of the 2010s is unlikely to return, regardless of where rates eventually settle.
Preparedness Is the Differentiator
The 472 product withdrawals got the headlines this month, but the operational fallout was wider than that. Products that stayed on shelf were repriced. Criteria shifted. Cases in flight had to be reassessed. The gap wasn't about who was paying attention. Most brokers were. It was about whether their setup let them act on what they knew, fast enough, for every affected client. Some firms had alerts firing, client lists filtered, and calls going out before the headlines landed. Others had the same knowledge but no quick way to turn it into action across their whole book.
That's what volatility exposes. Friction. The distance between knowing something has changed and being able to act on it for every affected client. In a stable market, that distance is invisible. In this one, it's the difference between a client who feels looked after and one who's left wondering.
Three questions worth asking:
1. Monitoring — are you hearing the signal? When 472 products disappear overnight, how do you find out? If the answer is "I check in the morning" or "a client tells me," there's a gap between what's happening and when you know about it. Rate alerts, sourcing platform notifications, even a simple BoE RSS feed. Most of the infrastructure already exists. The issue is whether any of it is part of the daily routine, or just sitting there.
2. Triage — can you identify who's affected? When a repricing event hits, the broker who serves their clients best is the one who can immediately say "I have 17 cases in flight that are affected by this move, and here's what I'm doing about each one." Not just clients whose product was withdrawn. Clients mid-application whose product just got repriced by 40bps. Clients who were about to lock in and now the numbers don't work. That requires client data and product data to be connected. If they're not, that step is manual. And in a fast-moving market, manual means some clients slip through.
3. Response — can you reach them fast enough? Same day? Same hour? The first call a client gets after their rate changes or their product disappears is the one they remember. The channel matters less than the speed, and the fact that you got there before they had to chase you.
Of the 472 products pulled this month, none were from Gen H. We repriced, sometimes upward, sometimes quickly, but our technology infrastructure and the way our funding agreements are structured meant we could reprice without pulling products or shortening timelines. For brokers with cases in flight on our products, that continuity matters more than anything: the application they started on Monday still worked on Wednesday. The operational plumbing absorbed the shock instead of passing it on. We're not claiming some special virtue here. We built the infrastructure before we needed it, and it worked when we did.
Those three questions are where readiness sits. What the answers look like in practice depends on the size and shape of the firm.
The macro case is clear enough. What I hear from brokers is more immediate: what does "being prepared" actually look like when you're already stretched thin, and how much of this is genuinely about doing things differently versus just doing more?
I've sat in hundreds of broker offices over the past few years, and the pattern is consistent. The firms that handle volatility well aren't the ones with the fanciest tech. They're the ones where the basics are connected: they know what their clients are on, they find out when something changes, and they can act on it without heroic late nights. And "something changes" is broader than products disappearing. A product repriced by 40bps mid-application is just as urgent for the client involved. So is a criteria change that knocks out a case you were about to submit. The firms that struggle aren't less capable. They just have gaps between those steps that only show up under pressure.
The tools exist. According to Twenty7tec's research, over two-thirds of brokers have a CRM, but only 23% engage with it regularly. Nearly 35% rarely or never use it at all (Twenty7tec, November 2025). The technology exists. The gap is setup. Is what you already have working for you, or is it just another thing to maintain?
A solo broker dealing with this volatility doesn't need a systems overhaul. They need to close one gap: the time between something changing and them knowing about it.
Start with what's already there. Most sourcing platforms have alerting features that go unused — worth checking what's switched on before buying anything new. A simple BoE RSS feed piped into email or a messaging app takes fifteen minutes to set up and means you're not finding out about rate moves from a client phone call.
On CRM: it matters less which one than whether client data is somewhere you can actually search and act on. A spreadsheet works until it doesn't. And "doesn't" usually means a morning like March 4th, when you need to know which clients have cases in flight on a product that's just been pulled or repriced, and the spreadsheet can't tell you fast enough. If you have a CRM and it's not working for you, that's worth interrogating: is it the tool, or is it the habit? A survey by Twenty7tec and Smart Money People (2025) found 69% of advisers want to switch CRM, but switching costs time and disruption. Sometimes the better move is making what you have actually work.
For outbound communication, speed matters more than polish. When a rate changes or a product disappears, the first broker to call is the one the client remembers. Email, SMS, a quick personal video -- the channel matters less than being able to reach affected clients within hours, not days. Free and low-cost tools exist for all of these. The goal is the same: less friction between knowing and doing.
At five-plus advisers, the challenge shifts from awareness to consistency. When a shock hits, does every adviser in the firm respond the same way, or does it depend on who happened to be paying attention?
The firms I've seen handle this well have three things in common. First, they use a mortgage-specific CRM rather than a general-purpose one, not because the features are dramatically different, but because the integration with sourcing data is tighter, and that integration is what makes triage possible at speed. Second, they've invested time in setting it up properly. A CRM that five advisers use inconsistently is worse than one that two advisers use well, because it creates a false sense of coverage. Third, they've built simple automations that turn a market alert into a team action. Not a sophisticated workflow, just a trigger that says "something changed, here's who needs to review what."
The gap that nobody's fully solved yet: no tool today can automatically say "these 17 clients are affected" the moment a product gets pulled or repriced. Sourcing data and CRM data still don't talk to each other at that level. Some platforms are starting to close this (monitoring in-pipeline recommendations for rate and criteria changes, for example) but the integration typically lives in the sourcing platform, not the CRM. For firms evaluating their setup, that's the question to put to vendors: not "what features do you have?" but "what happens when a product my client is mid-application on gets repriced at 7pm on a Tuesday?"
The cost varies. But a simple stack that's properly wired together will outperform an expensive one where the pieces don't talk to each other.
Consumer Duty expects firms to act on market changes that affect their clients. A systematic approach to monitoring is getting harder to justify not having. That doesn't mean every firm needs automation tomorrow. But brokers who can show they were actively monitoring on behalf of clients will be in a stronger position than those who can't.
None of this requires ripping out what's already working. The best brokers I know didn't buy their way to readiness. They got there by noticing where the gaps were and closing them one at a time.
Networks already do excellent work on sourcing, and some are starting to add monitoring too, which is a natural extension of that capability. If yours isn't there yet, it's worth raising: could they help you spot rate moves and criteria changes as well as find products in the first place? Same with CRM vendors. If they can't explain how their product helps when markets move fast, that's a conversation worth having.
The test is simple: if rates moved overnight and half your pipeline was suddenly on the wrong product, would you be calling your clients, or would they be calling you? If the answer is the latter, that's the gap worth closing. At your own pace, but with some urgency.
The Number the BoE Is Actually Watching
Hal
Headline CPI fell to 3.0% and the papers celebrated. But the number the MPC is actually fixated on is services inflation, which sat at 4.4% in January and has barely budged. Regular pay growth at 4.2% feeds directly into it. The oil shock adds energy costs on top.
Deutsche Bank forecasts CPI approaching 4% by end-2026 if services doesn't crack. The March 19 MPC decision will hinge on services, not the headline number. The "inflation is falling" narrative is doing real damage to client expectations.
Sara
Every broker is fielding the "but inflation's falling, won't rates follow?" question. They need the 30-second version of why that's more complicated than the papers suggest. Services inflation is the stubborn part, and it's the part that drives rate decisions. That framing — headline vs services, and which one the MPC actually watches — is worth passing on.
Sources: ONS CPI January 2026; Deutsche Bank UK inflation forecast; ING rates forecast; BoE MPC minutes, February 2026.
Second Charges Just Hit an 18-Year High
Hal
41,760 new second charge loans in 2025, worth £2.14 billion — up 24% year-on-year. That's the highest volume since 2008, though the market structure is materially different this time: post-2014 regulation, tighter affordability checks, and a product that's evolved from last-resort credit into a mainstream capital-raising tool. Second charges now account for nearly a third of all capital-raising lending.
The driver is partly borrowers preserving low first-charge rates from the 2021–22 vintage, partly the product range and lending appetite broadening significantly. March's repricing makes any rate-preservation maths even more compelling for borrowers still sitting on competitive legacy deals. A third of capital-raising is not a niche.
Sara
For brokers where second charge advice isn't part of their proposition, it's worth exploring what's involved, because the volume is there and growing. For some firms that means getting qualified and panelled; for others it might mean finding a good specialist partner to refer to. Either way, a third of capital-raising conversations shouldn't be walking out the door without the broker being part of them.
Sources: Finance & Leasing Association via Mortgage Solutions, 2025 full-year data; Signal 19.
Market Watch is a monthly commentary from Hal Sarjant and Sara Palmer at Gen H.
It reflects our personal views and observations, not financial advice.
All data referenced is from public sources unless stated otherwise.
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