Legal & General’s fintech is making a £3 million investment in Smartr365, a software as a service (SaaS) company, which supplies systems to the UK mortgage intermediary market.
The business was set up two years ago with the aim of helping mortgage brokers deliver a digital and more efficient service for customers.
Smartr365 offers services such as an online fact find, CRM and customer verification processes, as well as a customer portal, which helps to build and cement long term engagement between advisers and their customers.
In addition to an end to end mortgage broking platform, Smartr365 will be making individual components available to other mortgage businesses and CRM providers. Part of this investment is to continue the development of LendrConnect, a mortgage application programming interface (API) service available to everyone in the market allowing all brokers to submit mortgages, direct to lenders at the touch of a button, with no re-keying of data.
Nick Frankland, Legal and General’s managing director of fintech will join the board of Smartr365 as a non-executive director.
He said: “We are huge supporters of the adviser market at Legal & General and recognise that they are invaluable in helping people through the home financing process. But we also recognise that they have to work very hard managing the administration when they could be using technology to free up their time and help more customers.
“Within the fintech business in Legal & General we look for opportunities to help markets on the journey from analogue to digital, especially where the customer experience can be improved as well. Smartr365 offers us the perfect platform to combine both of these aims and help the entire mortgage industry.
“I am personally looking forward to working closely with the management team at Smartr365 and sharing ideas to continue innovating the platform that Smartr365 is offering to intermediaries, right across the UK.”
Conor Murphy, director of Smartr365, added: “The objective of Smartr365 is to support the whole mortgage advice market by leveraging the benefits of technology to drive value and efficiency, thereby allowing intermediaries to process more volume, whilst delivering a smoother process for customers.
“The Smartr365 platform takes the administrative heavy lifting away from advisers, typically condensing 10 hours of work down to just one hour, and allowing the focus to be the provision of sound advice. Legal & General’s decision to invest is a huge endorsement and major milestone for Smartr365. Their experience and expertise in helping to scale technology-based businesses will be instrumental in allowing us to drive the business forwards.
“The new funding will allow us to further develop our proposition; the beauty of software as a service solutions, is the ability to constantly evolve and upgrade the offering, with improvements delivered to users at pace. Product development is our number one focus and having the financial and strategic backing of Legal & General as a partner is vital to help us achieve our goals in this area.
“Our aim is to deliver the best solution to advisers and consumers and to continuously evolve so we remain at the forefront of developments in this exciting sector, whilst empowering as many advisers as possible across the whole industry.”
