The chief executive of the fintech platform said the customer experience was a priority but so far there had been nothing to disrupt the market in the same way as Netflix or Uber.
Cheetham said: “The overriding strategic theme in any industry and country is customer experience. When did I stop walking 15 minutes to Blockbuster and start preferring to stream movies on Netflix? When was the moment I stopped googling taxi firms and just started using Uber? When did I stop buying records and start using Spotify?
“That is the thing that’s lacking with financial services. We can see this trend coming. We’re going to be an enabler of that Netflix moment for the mortgage market.”
MQube’s technology automates the mortgage process using artificial intelligence and machine learning. It can identify and extract information from uploaded documents without human intervention.
Cheetham said: “There’s lots of technology being deployed but because it’s digitising existing processes we haven’t really seen a change in customer experience. Not dramatically or at scale.”
Emma Hollingworth, distribution director of MQube, added it was also a matter of different technology working together.
She said the industry had not seen anyone come in and offer full end-to-end digitalisation only slivers of the process which did not always join up together smoothly and were no different to legacy processes.
She added: “One day, like Stuart said, he didn’t know he needed Uber, I didn’t know I needed Netflix. If something like that comes into the market and a customer realises they can get a mortgage offer quickly and painlessly that will be because they’ve been on some amazing user experience journey.
“Then the consumer is going to expect that elsewhere. It will become a consumer push which forces the market to change. It will slowly creep up on people as we see this innovation come in.”
Hollingworth said while some lenders can issue mortgage offers in a day, it was the exception rather than the norm.
“A lot of lenders can get an offer out in 24 hours, but when they do that, it’s widely celebrated on social media. The game changer in the market is to be able to do that consistently and at scale,” she said.
Cheetham said it was also not up to brokers to adopt all the technology that comes into the industry. Instead, he said it was up to fintech firms to create platforms that customers and clients want to use.
“The industry has it backwards. I go to conferences and people say ‘broker, you have to change, technology is coming you’ll be left behind’. And that’s simply not true.
“What happens is people like us come along with a bit of experience and service and only when we win the right for them to be confident then they’ll change,” he added.
Further expansion
Earlier this year, its subsidiary lending platform MPowered Mortgages went live through Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB). MPowered Mortgages white labels buy-to-let deals from mainstream lenders.
MQube also hopes to extend the offering of its subsidiary MPowered Mortgages beyond buy-to-let products and into residential mortgages. Cheetham hinted at further partnerships in the pipeline.
Cheetham said MQube’s technological capabilities would not be fully realised until further developments were made across the industry, but suggested it had the tools in place to adapt to any future changes.
He said the firm’s current focus was to change the way brokers deliver customer outcomes and improve client experiences.
Cheetham said: “If we empower that to happen that will be the Netflix moment for the industry.”
