Ex-Lloyds executive wants to ‘fintech’ mortgages
A former Lloyds executive wants to accelerate the mortgage process by bringing AI into the mix.
Stuart Cheetham worked at Lloyds bank for over a decade, spanning senior roles across Asia. He was chief executive in Hong Kong and managing director in Japan.
However, since departing the Big Four bank, Cheetham founded his own company to streamline the mortgage process.
Using AI technology, Cheetham’s MPowered Mortgages aims to reduce the steps to get a full mortgage offer to under 24 hours. Traditionally, the process to receive an offer can last up to a month.
Speaking to Morning Wire, Cheetham said: “The whole premise of this was that I should be able to get a mortgage as fast and as simply as I buy car insurance.”
He added that new technology was changing the user experience “then all of a sudden you come to mortgages, and it was almost going back to the Dark Ages”.
“You don’t have any certainty, you go into this blackhole of uncertainty around getting a mortgage,” Cheetham told Morning Wire.
Big Four bank invested in MPowered
MPowered received its first source of funding in April 2019 from three core firms, including Jam Jar, a consumer venture capital run by the founders of Innocent Drinks.
Cheetham said the beginning was a “fantastic combination of deep entrepreneurial experience” with each sharing the central view that obtaining a mortgage should be easier process.
MPowered received a second round of investors two and a half years after starting the business, which included backing from Barclays.
Cheetham declined to comment on further developments in their partnership, but said the Big Four bank is a “big investor” in the company.
He said expanding partnerships were part of “adding value in this process” and it was about “working with people, not eliminating them”.
“People want simplicity. People want certainty. People want ease. And if you deliver all those things, actually, it’s a home run of solutions,” he added.
He explained the AI was capable of responding to “really complex questions” like “a Swiss-natural two-tier visa looking to buy a flat roof new build property in Newcastle” with simple and direct answers.
Cheetham recalled during his tenure at Lloyds’ Hong Kong office, he worked on a mortgage project where the application to offer process was 28 days – a time frame he called “ridiculous”.
He said his experience on the project taught him: “You’ve got to be non-standard all the time, so you have to be completely dynamic to the borrower and their situations.”
The AI mortgage lender has been incorporated with this philosophy, with independent sourcing of information to ensure tailored answers.
“Your accounts are read automatically so you’re not having to type in laborious amounts of details, and when it’s unique to you, we ask.
“It was almost the opposite of what I did in Lloyds.”
MPowered uses its own in-house team for AI development, whilst also bridging to the open source market for further leverage.
The technology is currently at the broker market place and within a beta testing format, but Cheetham said the feedback so far had been “brilliant”.