SPF Private Clients has adopted IBM Watson and IBM Cloud to develop Ava, a new AI virtual Help to Buy mortgage adviser. Ava was created to handle the significant increase in enquiries from first-time buyers looking to take advantage of the Government's Help to Buy scheme and the added complexities of the eligibility criteria. It helps first-time buyers onto the property ladder by offering round-the-clock support for any query they may have. It answers customer questions, verifies personal details and documentation while processing enquiries at a faster rate. It aims to give a mortgage indication in just three minutes.

Getting a mortgage is one of the few customer experiences that has, until now, been left pretty much untouched by the digital revolution. You still have to talk to someone on the phone, most likely book an appointment, and then meet with a real person face to face. But a small number of firms are starting to shake this up by going online. This week UK tech startup Habito has launched what it claims is'the world's first artificially intelligent digital mortgage adviser'. But what exactly does that mean?

'Chatbots are the new apps," said Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year. He was not the first senior tech exec to make this claim. "Threads are the new apps," suggested Facebook's head of messaging products David Marcus in January, referring to the threads of conversation in apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Nadella and Marcus see chatbots – computer programs that you interact with by "chatting", for example in threads in messaging apps – as an important new human/machine interface. Both of their companies have launched tools to help developers create these bots, and between April and September, more than 30,000 were made for Facebook Messenger alone. The shopping and breaking news bots in Messenger's ancestors are chatbots such as AI psychotherapist Eliza from the mid-1960s and Parry, a bot mimicking a human with paranoid schizophrenia, in the early 1970s. Since 1991, the chatbot equivalent of the Olympics has been the annual Loebner prize, which challenges bots ...

Able to provide tailored mortgage advice and recommendations to mortgage applicants in the convenience of their own homes, this proof of concept is one of a raft of new ideas and innovations looking to transform the mortgage market.