Our research and development team is a real mixed bunch of amazing people. When it comes to development, we believe in recruiting the very best technical talent, regardless of background, previous experience or education. This means we have a fairly diverse range of developers, from across industries, who are recruited for their impressive technical skills, not necessarily their mortgage experience.
Their work is, however, supported by our business analysts and researchers, who most definitely have a background in the mortgage industry. It’s their sector knowledge that makes them brilliant at feeding in intel, informing developers and helping to analyse and assess products to ensure they meet the specific needs of the mortgage industry.
This team diversity works, the proof being the innovations that we are creating, for brokers and lenders, to support them in meeting the market challenges they face today and beyond.
How it works
Developing technology for the mortgage industry means it’s key that we work with those people who actually understand mortgages – the look and feel of a product, and the particular industry nuances. Our product team is where you’ll find those people. Ex-brokers, such as Jason Hegarty, who was advising on mortgages for many years, and is now head of innovation. Our head of product, David Alexander, previously worked at a specialist lender, as well as Experian. We also have others who are homegrown and joined the company in a junior role, who’ve gained their experience and knowledge on the job.
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The development team, our ‘techy’ people, is made up of those across industries – talent with varied career backgrounds in fintech, retail, and aerospace. The benefits of having a development team built on tech skills rather than industry experience mean that we gain a truly rounded picture with lots of interesting perspectives.
So how does it work in practice? Take user experience, for example. On the analyst side, the team understands the industry and will have an informed view on what the broker perspective is likely to be. So, when we’re talking about user experience, we can confidently predict how a broker is going to feel and act when they use our products because many of our analysts have worked as brokers, or a similar ancillary role. Their experience provides us with valuable insight into the tools we are building and how they will support the end user.
From a development perspective, having previous experience in the mortgage industry is less important. In fact, we want the opposite. We need developers to have the broadest breadth of experience from a technology perspective – to bring the best bits of technology knowledge from across a host of different industries into the team. Having someone on the team who has worked in aerospace, for example – which from a technological perspective is a faster-moving industry than mortgages – they’re full of really incredible ideas and skills that put us in a market-leading position.
Testing pilots and feedback
Once the business analysts have designed the products that the developers are going to be building, we then put them into real live testing pilots so that they can be used, scrutinised, and improved to ensure that the technology works.
Our partners, including a number of large mortgage networks, receive access to new functions 3-4 weeks before they go into development so they can see what it looks like and give us important feedback. We are in constant communication with our partners as we are committed to creating the very best products to support our broker users. If things need changing, the developers set to it. It’s a constant flow of feedback and improvement between us, our analysts and developers, and our partners.
The code speaks for itself
Our development team is made up of the best people from all across the world. We recruit to ensure that we gain the very best experience from the best kind of technology. A developer who is required for coding doesn’t need to have perfect written English, as long as they can articulate that there is an issue that needs fixing.
This means that when it comes to the recruitment process, we are more interested in highlighting the areas on a CV where a candidate looks to be a good fit. They might not necessarily be the most at ease in a one-to-one verbal interview, so we let their skills speak for them by setting them a piece of code to tackle. We then review them on the quality of their code, rather than on their ability to verbally sell themselves in a traditional interview setting.
All that matters is: does the code they write and the ideas they come up with speak for themselves?
Looking away from the sector for change
When looking at trends and developments in the mortgage technology space, it’s a balance. There’s an element of needing to deliver solutions specific to the mortgage industry, but sometimes the quickest and the best way to do that is to look at other industries and the way that they have solved a problem for a specific technical issue.
I think the diversity of our team and our exposure to other industries is what makes Mortgage Brain different. We’re able to draw that out, spin it around and use it to the advantage of the mortgage industry.
We’ve invested heavily and strategically over the past few years in order to redevelop and refine our systems, in some cases from scratch; for example, with the creation of CRM Brain. This investment has definitely put us at a competitive advantage and has given us the momentum to keep on innovating.
It means our customers are getting brand new tech to the market, delivered through the best of both worlds – they benefit from our 35-plus years of experience as Mortgage Brain and our knowledge of what the industry needs, but also we have greenfield technology that is built in the most dynamic and secure way by those from some of the most exciting industries in the world.
