Mortgage broker ‘disruptor’ reveals £140m milestone
Mojo Mortgages already claims online estate agent Doorsteps as partners, along with Zoopla's personal finance site and CreditLadder.
An up-and-coming mortgage broker that’s partnered with online estate agents and proptech firms in the UK has processed home loan referrals worth £140 million just a year after launching a ‘white label’ plug-in for third parties.
Within the property sector its service, which is delivered exclusively online, offers traditional and online estate agents the ability to generate personalised recommendations for customers in just 15 minutes.
It is already being used by Doorsteps.co.uk, Zoopla’s personal finance platform Money.co.uk and will soon be used by rental recognition platform CreditLadder.
Richard Hayes, co-founder and CEO of Macclesfield-based Mojo Mortgages (above, right), says: “We’re on a mission to create a better mortgage experience for everyone, which is why we launched our strategic partnerships platform last year.
“Since then, the platform has won an industry-leading award, and we have helped thousands of customers get a mortgage, or remortgage through it.”
Mojo may be all shiny tech including an easy-to-use API ‘plug in’ for partners to use, but it’s a traditional mortgage broker behind the scenes. It has access to 20,000 mortgage products, like many other brokers used by estate agents, and its API offers all mortgage types including buy-to-let so customers can access the best deals for them across more than 90 lenders.
It has three more undisclosed partners about to join but in July pulled its biggest coup – partnering with the UK’s most high-profile online bank, Monzo.
I fully embrace that the millennials and Gen -Z, want a quick omni channel response to everything, including the sale and purchase of property and all the processes in-between. And that iniatives like Mojo Mortgages, may well be on trend for these clients.
However, I am a little unsure as to their tie up with for instance Monzo, which itself is a new fintech / Proptech company, whose origin can be traced back to crowdcube, and an instantaneous crowdfund of over £1M. Since then Monzo (Formerley Mondo) has had further injections of capital, and its valuation has skyrocketed, but, so too have the number of issues regarding its service and security, all documented in the financial press.
I suppose what I am saying is that – at the very fast rate that some things are changing in the ‘traditional and stable world of agency’ – many co-operations and inter company collaborations are sometimes founded upon organizations which are less than 5-years old. And this lack of maturity, can cause problems, if any of the ‘jenga block’ partnerships fail to deliver and need to be removed, and it is often the poor shareholders and users of the service who are the losers.
Recent peer to peer lenders like ‘Lendy’ failing with over £160M of losses, may be in a different financial sector to mortgage business regulated by the FSA, but, with Metro bank also in the doldrums, what they had in common was they sought to be disruptors of the banking sector, instead they may well be the victims of it.