A FinTech firm which is shaking up the mortgage sector has enjoyed a 405 per cent growth in applications in 15 months – and its CEO believes there’s more to come.
Macclesfield-based Mojo Mortgages received £7m in funding earlier this year and CEO and co-founder Richard Hayes predicts it could become a half a billion pound business in time.
The entrepreneur told BusinessCloud that Mojo Mortgages is about to launch a new product called Mortgage Score which will take the business to the next level.
Mojo, which is short for ‘mortgage journey’, uses an algorithm to match the specific needs of customers against more than 20,000 mortgage products to find the right one.
The current iteration of Mojo was only launched in April 2018 by Hayes and Nick Sherratt but has already helped more than 50,000 people and saved customers £4m in broker fees.
Hayes said: “Mojo Mortgages is a FinTech and we make mortgages easier. Every month has to be a record month. We’re exceptionally focused as a business on growth.
“We’re on a trajectory for a Series B investment and when you’re going through a scaling process one of the important things is that continued growth.”
Although not disclosing the precise numbers he said the number of mortgage applications coming through the site in July 2019 were up 405 per cent from last May.
For the last six months the company has been working on a new product called Mortgage Score that is just about to launch.
“What we found is that a lot of people visiting the website are not ready to buy a mortgage,” he said. “They wanted to understand what they needed to do to get mortgage ready.
“Mortgage Score allows someone to sign up to Mojo but instead of immediately going for a mortgage application they get their mortgage score.
“Their mortgage score is a combination of their spending habits; how much they earn; their credit score from Experian; how much they’ve got saved up; and some personal insights into how much they’re thinking about buying a house for. We use all that data to give them an insight into when they might be mortgage ready.”
Mojo Mortgages employs 60 people and Hayes said the sector needed to embrace technology fully.
“The UK market is the largest in Europe although it’s quite unique in that intermediaries – or brokers – play an integral part in the life cycle,” he said.
“Brokers are involved in 80 per cent of all mortgage sales in the UK but the market is really fragmented. Currently around 42 per cent don’t even have a website! We see it as an opportunity for disruption.”
Mojo Mortgages was a rebrand from the previous title of Life’s Great in 2018 and specialised only in mortgages.
“Over the next four years we’re going for a five per cent market share in the UK mortgage intermediary space,” said Hayes. “We’ve also started investigating additional territories and understanding how we can scale this into other territories.”