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Acre’s 5 biggest wins of 2022 (so far!)

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As always, time has flown by and we’re shocked to find ourselves already halfway through 2022!

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Despite life being excitingly busy at Acre and our platform constantly progressing, we wanted to take the time to look back at five things that we’re proud of achieving so far this year.

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If you’re not yet using Acre’s platform, then we promise that the time invested in finding out more about us will save you hundreds of hours in the future… and if you use our platform already, here are five reasons why you now have the time to read this!

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1. PMS launch

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Back in January we announced our partnership with PMS Mortgage Club, meaning PMS members could get over 2 years access to Acre completely free of charge, when they place their mortgage and protection business with PMS.

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Since then, we’ve onboarded lots of amazing mortgage and protection firms, and we’re excited to see the number of firms choosing to switch to Acre increasing each month. Our users are hugely important to us, and we work closely with them to understand their needs so we can find more ways to save them time, money and headaches.

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2. Positive feedback from users

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One of the most rewarding things about making a new product is hearing from your users. We always enjoy learning about our customers and how they use what we build every day. Our customer success team is working non-stop to on-board, train, and support brokers using our system. Here are some of the great quotes they have gotten in the past few weeks:

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"I am delighted with the system. You're helpful, I tell my guys this is a great team, usually firms promise things they don't deliver." – Principal based in South Yorkshire

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“The system is exactly what I was looking for to give me more structure to my sales process. I cannot fault anyone I have encountered from Acre, training and support is excellent!” – Principal based in East Sussex

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“As soon as I call or email the team, it’s basically instant. The team are on it and help me so quickly. As a business owner I’m so busy, and if there’s ever a hitch it’s all on just me. But the Customer Success team are so fast and efficient.” – Principal based in West Yorkshire

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3. Innovative integrations

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Acre was built from the ground up to be a flexible, modular platform for mortgage and protection advice. That means that the platform can benefit from all kinds of other services, integrated directly into everyday use. Here are some examples we are excited about:

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Equifax for credit reporting

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There’s nothing quite as frustrating for advisors as spending loads of time on a case only to find that a client has adverse credit and is likely to get rejected at application. Advisors often request that their customers sign up to a third-party credit service in order to get a copy of their credit report, trying to prevent nasty surprises at application time.

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With our integration with Equifax, clients can get a copy of their report directly in the Acre Client Portal - without an additional account or subscription – at no cost! Because the data is populated directly into the fact find, our brokers instantly benefit too.

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Uinsure

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We were thrilled to expand our relationship with Uinsure to allow advisors to sell Home Insurance in one-click. With the added pressure homeowners are facing with the cost-of-living crisis, it’s never been more important to have the right coverage for their homes.

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Acre DIPs

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The mortgage industry has been promising integrations for decisions in principle (DIPs) and applications for years, but most of the implementations are hard to use and still require a load of re-keying. That’s why we knew it was important that we made the process in Acre as smooth and seamless as possible.

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We kicked that off with our integration with lenders like TSB, Leeds, Accord and Aldermore though Iress’ Lender Connect, and we have a lot in store for the rest of 2022, including some of the UK’s biggest lenders.

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ONS Data

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Fact finding is difficult enough without having the get out your phone bill and check your bank or credit card statement to estimate how much money you spent eating out last month. So we use the same source of data that banks use – from the Office of National Statistics – to make a statistical guess at what the right numbers should be. This puts us in line with what lenders expect while lowering the burden of a fine-grained budget planner for clients.

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Property Data

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Acre integrates with all kinds of UK property data sources in order to give a full picture of what homebuyers are really buying. From Land Registry searches to EPC’s and local geology, Acre covers it all. Watch for our upcoming property portal announcement for a lot more detail on what we are doing in this space!

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4. Launching and improving loads of great features

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Over the last 6 months we’ve launched a raft of great features and functionality for our products, some of the biggest include:

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Electronic Identity and Verification: With identity fraud on the rise and getting harder to catch it’s important for advice firms to be able to easily run checks on their customers to satisfy the latest regulatory and financial crime requirements. Our new EIDV tools allow advisors and admins to run checks on clients at the click of a button. Clients themselves can upload their ID docs and a selfie to ensure they really are who they say they are. You can find more about Acre’s best-in-market EIDV in our recent blog post.
Accounting: Bring all your commissions and fees into one place. Fees are automatically created and kept in sync with your case, without wasting time maintaining spreadsheets and manual processes.
Compliance View: Our in-depth compliance view reduces file-check time by highlighting key information on cases for brokers
Calendar Integration: Seamlessly create and track calendar invites for your clients in one system so that you no longer need to rely on communicating over email or phone to find a time that suits you both. Acre’s customisable customer facing scheduler enables your clients to self-select an appointment time based on your automatically synced calendar, saving you time and avoiding errors.

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5. A growing team

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To create a best-in-class product, we've brought together an all-star team of experts who have the knowledge and passion to improve the way people buy homes.

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One of the most common things we hear from team members is how great it is to get to work with such smart and talented people, which we're massively proud of, and we couldn't have achieved the rest of this list without them!

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Since the start of this year, we've had 12 new joiners and counting. We're always looking for amazing people to help us on our mission, if you're interested be sure to look at our open roles, or get in touch

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Acre is now Score

What's changed?

What's changing is the name and the way we look. Acre is now trading as Score, with a fresh brand identity to match, but everything you rely on stays exactly where it is. It's still the same mortgage all-in-one platform that advisors, firms, and networks across the country already use to grow their businesses, now presented under a name that brings us in line with the wider ClearScore Group.

Why the new name?

ClearScore acquired Acre earlier this year, and we've carried plenty of momentum into life as part of the Group since. Moving to the Score brand is a natural next step, because it brings us in line with ClearScore and reflects the mission we share, which is to make home buying quicker and easier and to help people take control of their financial lives. As our founder and Managing Director Justus Brown has put it, the day-to-day service you receive won't change at all, and bringing our brand together with the Group simply makes that shared mission clearer.

Has the mission changed?

Not in the slightest! We have always been here to make home buying quicker and easier, taking the pain out of the process so that people can get into their homes sooner, and that is exactly what we will keep doing, with a good deal more behind us now to do it well.

Will the service change?

No, it won't, you'll continue working with the same platform and the same people, and your existing contracts and commercial terms stay exactly as they are, still held with the same legal entity, Acre Platforms Limited. Our Customer Success team will keep looking after you just as they do today.

About ClearScore

Who is ClearScore?

The ClearScore Group is a global leader in financial marketplaces, helping over 27 million people access credit, insurance, and other financial products with greater transparency, fairness, and control. It founded its flagship UK credit marketplace in 2015, has since expanded across four continents and into new verticals such as its DriveScore app, and now works with over 200 partners worldwide. ClearScore is profitable, growing, and on a mission to make personal finance clearer, calmer, and easier to understand, and that mission runs right through its culture, along with a genuine belief in giving people more clarity and control over their money.

How do we fit into ClearScore?

We sit alongside ClearScore's other technology platforms, including D•One, its open banking service for lenders, together powering borrowing and home lending across unsecured credit, auto finance, and now mortgages.

What does the change
unlock?

What does joining ClearScore bring?

Joining ClearScore gives us a great deal more room to grow. With their backing, we can accelerate our technology roadmap and bring new AI-powered features to the platform faster than we could before, and we can enrich what we build with ClearScore's proprietary data and insights, getting cutting-edge technology into the hands of mortgage and protection businesses sooner.

What do brokers and firms stand to gain?

For the brokers and firms who use us, it really comes down to growing faster. Drawing on ClearScore's financial power and its UK user base of over 16 million, we can build the features you ask for more quickly and bring more leads into the ecosystem, which gives brokers, networks, and advisors more opportunities to win new business.

Is the business growing?

We're growing quickly, and so are the firms who build their business on the platform. Since the acquisition, we've seen record numbers of monthly mortgage submissions come through Score, and we've more than doubled our revenue year on year, with growth of over 2.5x. That momentum is showing up in our customers' businesses too: firms on the platform are saving each broker around four days a month on application processing, identifying protection needs for 85% of their mortgage clients, and doubling their client conversion rates. Delivering results like these takes serious engineering and serious investment, and with ClearScore behind us we can keep raising that bar at a pace few others in the market can match.

Why build your business on Score?

Because you'll be choosing a platform that is built to last. A lot of new mortgage tools have appeared lately, and many of them are small, pop-up CRMs put together quickly on basic AI, the kind of thing that can disappear just as fast as it arrived. Score is a very different proposition, we are an established, whole-of-market platform that brokers, networks, and advisors across the country already trust with their businesses, and we are now backed by one of the most advanced and reliable fintech stacks in the industry through ClearScore. A proven platform, real investment, and genuine scale mean we can keep powering ahead of newer, lighter-weight tools and keep building for the long term.

Independence and
ownership

Is Acre being absorbed into ClearScore?

No. We operate as an independent business unit within the ClearScore Group, with our full management team staying exactly where they are, and we'll carry on supporting mortgage and protection firms with the same data-driven platform, now with the reach and scale of the wider Group behind us.

Will our advice-first philosophy change?

No. We have always believed that the best mortgage decisions come from high-quality, personal advice, and it is a belief ClearScore shares. If anything, the direction the market is heading only reinforces it, which is why we will stay a whole-of-market platform focused on helping brokers do their very best work for their clients.

Your data

Is my data safe?

Yes, and nothing about the move to Score changes that. Your data, and your clients' data, is protected by exactly the same contractual obligations and technical safeguards as before, and being part of ClearScore does not give anyone new access to it. We will never introduce your customers to a third party without the right consent, and your clients always keep the rights to their own data. If anything, joining a group whose entire business is built on handling data responsibly, and only ever with the user's permission, raises the bar we hold ourselves to.

The best way to see what Score can do is to book a demo, and we'll walk you through the platform and how it could work for your firm. If you'd rather drop us a line, you can reach our sales team at sales@scoremortgage.com, or send any general enquiries to hello@scoremortgage.com.