Brickflow and Together automate property finance DIPs for brokers

Brickflow, the UK digital commercial property finance platform, has launched an automated Decision-in-Principle capability built exclusively with specialist lender Together, giving brokers real-time lending decisions on bridging loans and commercial term products without a single manual step from the lender's side.

The feature, branded AutoDIP, sits inside Brickflow's existing broker-facing interface. A broker submits deal details, relevant Together products surface alongside competing lenders on the panel, and once Together is shortlisted, the broker requests a DIP directly within the platform. Together's system returns an automated decision within seconds. The company says no manual intervention is required on the lender side, allowing brokers to present confirmed terms to clients immediately after submission.

Automation meets a documented bottleneck

The timing is not arbitrary. Research from Nottingham Building Society found that the affordability assessment and DIP stage is a common stalling point for complex cases, cited by 16% of brokers surveyed, while 32% identified faster lender decision-making as a top priority for improvement. Together, which has operated for 50 years and carries a loan book of £8.4 billion, is betting that embedding its decisioning engine directly inside a distribution platform addresses that friction more effectively than incremental improvements to its own standalone process.

Glenn Franklin-Jones, Director of Lender Relations at Brickflow, framed it in operational terms: "By delivering instant DIPs through automation, we're providing brokers with faster certainty, reducing friction, and helping them progress cases more efficiently for their clients."

The integration deepens a pre-existing commercial relationship. Together was already a panel lender on Brickflow, which connects brokers and borrowers with live rates and criteria from more than 160 specialist lenders. AutoDIP moves the relationship from a standard listing to a direct API-level integration, a structural shift that makes Together's products stickier within the Brickflow workflow at the earliest and most decisive stage of the lending journey.

Convergence of proptech and fintech automation

The broader read-across here sits at the intersection of property technology and financial services automation. UK commercial property finance has historically been slow to digitise compared with residential mortgage origination, partly because deal complexity and bespoke underwriting criteria made automation harder to justify. The Brickflow-Together model challenges that assumption by carving out a narrower, well-defined decision type (the early-stage DIP) and automating it specifically, rather than attempting to automate the full underwriting stack at once.

This incremental but high-impact approach mirrors patterns emerging across embedded lending infrastructure more broadly. Rather than wholesale platform replacement, lenders are increasingly choosing to expose decisioning APIs through established distribution channels, letting broker-facing platforms handle the user experience while the lender's logic runs in the background. For capital allocators watching the UK proptech and specialist lending space, the signal is that competitive differentiation is shifting from product range to integration depth and decision speed.

Together's scale, at £8.4 billion in loans and more than 900 employees, gives it the engineering resource to pursue this kind of infrastructure build while smaller specialist lenders are unlikely to move as quickly. That asymmetry may accelerate consolidation of broker distribution toward a handful of platforms capable of hosting deep lender integrations, compressing the addressable market for standalone broker tools that cannot offer equivalent automation. For sovereign and institutional capital already positioned in UK real estate debt or specialist lending, the operational efficiency gains implied by AutoDIP-style integrations are worth monitoring as a proxy for margin resilience in a higher-for-longer rate environment.