University drop-out, mortgage broker, publisher, software provider and young entrepreneur of the year at The National Business Awards 2003 are all ways of describing Simon Nixon, co-founder of sourcing system Mortgage 2000 and the burgeoning Mortgage 2000 Financial Group.

Nixon is an informal character, eschewing the ‘suited and booted’ look favoured by other corporate figures. He is a fast and free talker; open about the central role his business plays in his life. Whether this will change if he becomes married or has children remains to be seen. But for the moment he is devoid of such distractions and it suits him just fine.

Mortgage 2000 Financial Group is projected to make a profit of £10m on a turnover of £40m this year. It has plans to float in the New Year and is eyeing further expansion plans and opportunities. When Nixon says supermarket chain Tesco is the company he most admires for what it has done on the high street, you begin to realise the size of his ambition and the hold he wants to take of the personal finance and associated markets.

Nixon is honest about his desire to be financially successful and says: “I did not want to be one of those people who enjoyed what they did but did not make any money.” He elected to study accountancy at Nottingham University, through which he hoped to make his fortune, but hated the course and left after two years.

An advert in the paper for financial advisers caught his attention and he joined Canadian firm Laurentian Life, where he specialised in mortgages. Nixon immediately began to spot and exploit market opportunities with commitment and confidence.

As a mortgage adviser he found there was no single ‘aggregator’ which enabled intermediaries to see all the mortgage products in the one place. He says: “I realised there was a gap in the market to launch something for financial advisers. At that point if you were a financial adviser and you wanted to find the best mortgage for your client – remember Moneyfacts had not even launched and there was no ‘best buys’ – there was nothing to give you access to it. So I set up a fortnightly magazine called Brokers’ Update.”

The magazine offered brokers lists of the best buys across a range of products as well as detailing all the providers in the market alphabetically and the products they were offering. Nixon sent out 1000 free copies every fortnight and received, on average, a 10% sign-up rate from those wishing to subscribe. Before long around 3500 advisers were buying the magazine.

It would be easy to say the gap in the market was an obvious one and that Nixon was simply in the right place at the right time. This may or may not be true, but the way he was conducting his mortgage broking job suggests he would have struck gold sooner or later.

Rather than having to call prospective borrowers about their mortgage needs, Nixon realised it would be easier if they were calling him. He visited the sales office of a local building company and did a deal with the saleswoman. Offering to increase her sales, he said he could organise the mortgages for the customers she had having difficulties finding a lender. Before long he was not simply giving advice to clients from one local office, but the entire North West as a division.

Unable to handle both his job and the growing magazine, Nixon chose publishing as the more exciting route, offering him the chance to be his own boss and the freedom to develop the business as he wished. Like most successful businesses, Nixon converted his biggest threat into his greatest opportunity, when the internet began to cast a shadow over the future of his magazine.

He says: “Subscriptions to the magazine peaked at the end of 1992 with between 3500 and 4000 subscribers, and it was at that point I noticed our subscriptions were starting to dwindle. It was because mortgage brokers were starting to find computers and a fortnightly mortgage magazine was just too out of date. They wanted access to the latest rates and a quote facility and also Mortgage Brain had just launched at that point. I realised straight away that either the magazine would slowly die over a period of time or we had had to adapt and convert our subscribers onto an electronic mortgage sourcing system.”

Not content with abandoning his own university career, Nixon then set about headhunting a close friend in his last year of an IT degree. He persuaded his friend to become his business partner and join his venture, and a year later Mortgage 2000 was launched. Nixon freely admits they benefited from seeing the working Mortgage Brain system when they built the Mortgage 2000 system, which was named after the approximate number of products in the market at that time.

For the mortgage market, Nixon’s plan is to create a universe where brokers can access all their product, processing and technology needs from a single source. As such, it launched the m2 mortgage club in 1995. It will complete around £2bn worth of mortgages this year and the profit it has made has allowed the subscription for the sourcing system to remain at between £20 and £25 per month since it was launched.

Nixon then pushed on with m2-d&p, the company’s packaging arm, and the recently-launched m2i network to help brokers cope with regulation. Advances have been made to the software available to brokers to help them with packaging, as well as brokers being offered the chance to create white-labelled web sites and get mortgage leads from another subsidiary, the Professional Adviser Alliance. There is also a correspondent lender in the group, Abacus, giving Mortgage 2000 the opportunity to promote itself through other industry distribution channels.

Nixon says of the various businesses: “Our goal is to be the one stop shop for brokers and if we can offer them everything then why do they have to leave the world of Mortgage 2000.”

More recently, the internet again threatened Nixon as direct-to-consumer sites began to provide volume sales in certain markets. Initially, he worried mortgages would become commodity products traded online, but this fear dissipated as it became clear many would use the internet as a research tool. He realised it could be used to generate leads for brokers from those who had researched products online and needed help with the final decision making.

Nixon says: “We saw the internet as a threat to our business as we thought customers would do it all online. Then we thought customers would not actually buy online but would use the internet to compare and research the product.”

For Nixon the challenge was now to develop the technology that Mortgage 2000 already had and develop something that was user friendly to the general consumer.

In 1999 moneysupermarket.com was launched. Nixon stresses that its goal is to provide customers with a whole of market comparison of the products it displays. These products have initially only been in the personal finance sector, but other opportunities are available and Nixon comments: “We are looking to continue our diversification with anything we can compare. We see ourselves as an online supermarket and we will move into any area that sells online which we can make money from.”

To fund such plans Nixon aims to float 25% of the business next year, and hopes to raise around £100m. He is looking at opportunities abroad as well and says the German and Spanish markets offer the business the best opportunities in Europe, while the size of the US market is another temptation.

Nixon says his main driver is a fear of failing in what he does, and few could accuse him of that when looking at The Mortgage 2000 Financial Group’s progress over the last decade. Whether Nixon is as successful at driving the business forward in the next decade remains to be seen, although he certainly shows no signs of resting on his laurels.

Increasingly, Nixon has found himself and his businesses talked about as they have developed and received various accolades. If nothing else this simply helps raise the profile of the business in Nixon’s view, even though the comment is a mix of good and bad, as you would expect.

Nixon feels the majority of the poor press he receives is a reflection on the success he and his companies have had and is simply from those trying to push him of his perch. With this Wildean philosophy you can call him what you like – it is doubtful he cares.