472 mortgage products disappeared in 48 hours this month. Swap rates whipsawed. The BoE's next move flipped from near-certain cut to near-certain hold in the space of days. If that sequence feels familiar, it should — it's the fifth major directional reversal since late 2023. In this first issue of Market Watch, we make the case that this isn't a crisis. It's the new operating rhythm. And we look at what that means for the brokers your network supports.
Here's a number that reframes everything: in the 1980s, the Bank of England changed its base rate 89 times. In the entire 2010s, it changed it zero times. That decade of absolute stillness — the longest hold in the Bank's 300-year history — was not normal. It was historically extraordinary.
The 2020s so far have seen roughly 18 rate changes. That's closer to the 1990s (~27 changes) than either extreme. We're not in unprecedented territory. We're returning to something that looks a lot like the historical baseline.
But there's a dimension to today's volatility that genuinely is new: mass product withdrawals. Before COVID, this simply didn't happen. There's no evidence in any source of lenders pulling hundreds of products overnight at any point before 2020. Then, in rapid succession:
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" (PropertyWire).
Timeline of product withdrawal events (nothing pre-2020, then five spikes) overlaid with swap rate volatility bands. Visual punch: empty left side, chaotic right side.
The swap rate picture tells the same story. In 2019, 5-year swaps ranged from 0.69% to 1.29% across the entire year. Normal daily moves were 5–10 basis points. Lenders could hold pricing for weeks without adjustment (Mortgage Solutions, October 2022).
Compare that to the post-2020 world. In September 2022, 2-year swaps spiked roughly 200bps in days — from around 3.75% to approximately 6%. In July 2023, 3-year swaps whipsawed 67bps in a fortnight, from 5.95% to 5.28% (Vedanta Hedging, MFBrokers). This month, 2-year swaps jumped 32bps in days, gilts saw their biggest weekly rise since the mini-budget, and the BoE's March cut probability collapsed from over 80% to 99% hold — with some intra-day pricing of actual rate hikes (Bloomberg, The British Eye, March 2026).
That last point is worth sitting with. Five major directional swings in BoE expectations since late 2023: a ~90bps dovish pivot, then a ~70bps hawkish repricing, then a sustained cutting cycle from 5.25% to 3.75%, then a dovish lean so strong that four MPC members voted to cut in February — and then, in the space of days, a complete reversal to pricing no cuts for the rest of 2026 (BoE MPC minutes, February 2026; Mortgage Introducer poll, March 2026). This kind of whiplash was inconceivable in the 2010s, when forward guidance pointed in one direction for years at a stretch.
The BoE's own Chief Economist, Huw Pill, put a name to this in October 2025. He described the current environment as the "NASTY" era — Not As Tranquil Years — and said that "the pace of change in the global economy, and the uncertainty that brings to the UK outlook, seem to be increasing rather than diminishing" (BoE speech, October 2025). That's not a commentator's opinion. It's the Bank's chief economist telling you the operating environment has structurally changed.
The structural reasons are worth understanding, because they explain why this persists even if individual crises resolve. Start with energy. European gas price volatility in 2024 was 50% above the 2010–2019 average (IEA). The shift from Russian pipeline gas to global LNG has created permanent exposure to weather events, geopolitical disruption, and competition for cargoes. TTF gas prices are still roughly double pre-crisis levels (IEA). That's not a spike — it's a new floor.
Then trade. Policy uncertainty hit record highs in January 2025 (BoE Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden, February 2025). The US tariff regime changed its legal basis twice in two months after the Supreme Court struck down IEEPA-based tariffs in February 2026 (NBC News, CNBC). The BIS warns that this "frequent cycle of announcements, adjustments, and reversals" is eroding supply flexibility and potentially "steepening the Phillips curve" — meaning future shocks produce larger inflation moves, requiring bigger policy responses (BIS Annual Report 2025).
And geopolitics. Chatham House's December 2025 assessment was blunt: "global security continued to unravel." Defence spending is at Cold War levels. New START — the last US-Russia nuclear arms control agreement — expired in February 2026 with no replacement. The Iran conflict is only the latest in a sequence that includes Ukraine, the energy crisis, and ongoing Middle East instability.
"The drivers of the Great Moderation may be unwinding."
Catherine Mann, BoE MPC member, November 2024
The historical parallel that makes most sense isn't the 1970s (too extreme — 15–17% base rates, double-digit inflation for a decade) and it isn't the 2008 crash (a single demand-side event). It's the 1985–1995 decade. That era had Bank Rate between roughly 5% and 15%, an average of about five rate changes per year, and multiple distinct shock episodes — the Lawson boom, ERM entry, Black Wednesday — with genuine uncertainty about the direction of rates (BoE Bank Rate database).
The critical difference: brokers in 1985–1995 dealt with this using telephones and paper. They didn't have the technology to monitor, triage, and respond in real time. We do. That's the opportunity buried inside the volatility story.
The OBR's March 2026 forecast projects CPI falling to 2.3% by end-2026 and returning to target from 2027, with GDP growth recovering to an average of 1.6% per year from 2027–2030 (OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook, March 2026). Global LNG supply is set to grow nearly 50% by 2030, which should moderate gas price volatility over time (IEA). And there's historical precedent: the stagflationary 1970s did eventually give way to the Great Moderation. Markets could be over-pricing persistence — if Iran de-escalates and services inflation cracks, the BoE has room to cut in H2 2026.
We think the balance of evidence points the other way, but we want to show our working rather than campaign for a position. Post-2020 shocks are supply-side, interconnected, and coincide with structural shifts — deglobalisation, demographic change, climate disruption — that were absent from prior recoveries. The conditions that enabled the Great Moderation are degraded: globalisation is reversing, commodity markets are fragmented, central bank credibility is being tested. But two things can be true simultaneously: the optimists might be right on inflation's direction, and the structural 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 settle.
A broker's core job is intermediation: take inbound market signals, turn them into outbound client actions. If the workflow is "wait for the client to call, then check what's available," it's built for a world that no longer exists. In a volatile market, the broker who hears the signal first and acts fastest serves their clients best.
As someone who builds the systems that sit behind this process, the gap I see most often isn't capability — it's plumbing. The tools exist. The question is whether they're connected. Here's how I'd frame the problem if I were advising a broker right now:
1. Monitoring — are you hearing the signal? When 472 products disappear overnight, how does a broker find out? If the answer is "I check in the morning" or "a client tells me," the monitoring system has a gap. The infrastructure exists — BoE RSS feeds, sourcing platform alerts, automated product monitoring — but the question is whether it's wired into the daily workflow or sitting unused.
2. Triage — can you identify who's affected? When a repricing event hits, the broker who wins is the one who can immediately say "these 17 clients have a product that was just withdrawn." If CRM data and sourcing data don't talk to each other, that step is manual — and in a fast-moving market, manual means slow.
3. Response — can you reach them fast enough? Same day? Same hour? The first call a client gets after their product disappears is the one they remember. The channel — email, SMS, video — matters less than the speed.
Those three questions — monitor, triage, respond — are where the operational gap sits. The rest of this piece is Sara's territory: what it actually looks like to close those gaps, depending on the size and shape of the firm.
Hal's laid out the case for why the market is operating differently now. The question I'd be asking is: what does a broker actually need to change, and how much of that depends on the size and shape of their firm?
The honest answer is that most of the tools Hal's describing already exist. The problem isn't access — it's that they're often sitting unused or disconnected from each other. 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). That's not a technology gap. It's a workflow gap.
A solo broker dealing with this volatility doesn't need a systems overhaul. They need to hear the signal faster.
A BoE RSS feed connected to Slack or email via Zapier is a 15-minute setup, free, and it means they're not finding out about rate moves from a client phone call. Google Alerts for "mortgage rate change UK" and key lender names adds another layer. Their sourcing platform — whether that's Twenty7tec, Mortgage Brain, or Trigold — most have alerting features that go unused. Worth checking what's already switched on before buying anything new.
On CRM: if a broker doesn't have one, something like Capsule (UK-built, free tier for up to 2 users and 250 contacts) or Pipedrive (visual pipeline, from around £22/month) will do more than a spreadsheet. If they have one and it's not working — a survey by Twenty7tec and Smart Money People (2025) found 69% of advisers want to switch — but switching costs time, so the replacement needs to actually solve the integration problem, not just be newer.
For outbound: Brevo (free up to 300 emails/day), TextMagic for urgent SMS at around 5p per message, Loom for personal video updates (free tier). A Calendly or Cal.com booking link saves the phone tag when a rate-change alert generates 30 callbacks.
Example stack: Capsule CRM (free) + Zapier (free) + BoE RSS + Google Alerts + Brevo (free) + Claude or ChatGPT (free tier) = roughly £5–10/month.
At five-plus advisers, the challenge isn't tools — it's whether the team is actually using what's already in place. Mortgage-specific CRMs (Smartr365, Acre, Twenty7tec CRM, JammJar) integrate with sourcing data better than general-purpose CRMs, but only if the firm has the discipline to use them consistently.
Automation starts to pay off at this scale. Zapier or Make connecting monitoring alerts to CRM task creation — "When BoE RSS fires, create a task to review affected clients" — turns Hal's plumbing metaphor into something practical.
The gap nobody's solved yet: no tool today can automatically say "these 17 clients are affected" when a product gets pulled. Sourcing data and CRM data don't talk to each other at that level. Twenty7tec's ADAPT (launched 6 March 2026) is the first product to monitor in-pipeline recommendations for rate and criteria changes and alert the adviser, but it sits in the sourcing platform, not in the CRM. For firms evaluating tools, that integration gap is the question to put to vendors.
Example stack: Capsule Growth or Pipedrive (£24–29/user/month) + Feedly Pro (£7) + Zapier Pro (£15–25) + Brevo Business (£15) + TextMagic (PAYG) + Claude Pro (£16) + Calendly (£8/seat) = roughly £200–350/month for a three-person firm.
Consumer Duty expects firms to act in clients' interests, including monitoring for market changes that affect them. Automated product monitoring doesn't just make a broker faster — it creates an audit trail that demonstrates compliance. That's worth flagging to brokers who might not have connected their daily workflow to their regulatory obligations.
None of this requires ripping out what's already working. Start with what's free, test what sticks, build from there.
If a network is providing sourcing but not monitoring, it's worth brokers asking why — and whether that's changing.
The test is simple: could a broker cope if 472 products disappeared tomorrow? If the honest answer is "they'd be scrambling," that's the gap worth closing — at their own pace.
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.
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.
41,760 new second charge loans in 2025, worth £2.14 billion — up 24% year-on-year. That's the highest volume since 2008. 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 maturing from last-resort to mainstream capital-raising tool. 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 — it's a structural segment.
For brokers where second charge advice isn't part of their proposition, it's worth exploring what's involved — 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 Gen H's monthly market commentary for the broker community.
It reflects our views and observations — not financial advice.
All data referenced is from public sources unless stated otherwise.
© 2026 Gen H · genh.co.uk