Company

Five years of transforming home-buying

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Buying a property can often involve a complex and frustrating journey. Justus, CEO and founder of Acre, experienced these common home-buying challenges firsthand back in 2017, which set the stage for Acre to be born…

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2018

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Acre was founded in 2018, driven by a vision to revolutionise the mortgage industry.

Central to Acre's innovation was the adoption of new, ground-breaking technology and the help from industry experts that Justus and his team at Founders Factory worked alongside for a year. At the end of 2018, we raised our seed funding which allowed us to start building the team.

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2019

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In 2019, with our seed funding in hand, we were able to start writing code and grow our team of tech leaders and industry experts. As a result, we were able to launch a private Beta version of our product to a group of early Acre adopters. These firms loved what the team had built and the technology proved able to help save brokers time and enable their clients to buy homes more efficiently. What we should have known is that these firms would change too - some stopped trading, others merged, and our contacts changed. We kept building though!

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2020

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We moved to a new office, but only got to use it for a couple of months. Despite being locked indoors due to the pandemic, the Acre team continued to add to the platform’s capabilities. Adding game-changing features and collaborating (remotely!) with partners to integrate ever more useful solutions into our platform. Notable integrations included:

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The pandemic caused even more changes with our partner firms - but we kept our heads up and kept building.

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2021

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After just two years and a LOT of hard work, Acre was ready to go to market. The unique technology was built to manage the mortgage journey in its entirety, with an unrivalled approach ensures brokers and lenders get the best outcomes for customers every time.

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The market’s reaction has been great -

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^{“It’s just a very easy system to get. It’s very powerful, but it’s done in a very simple, easy to interact with way”}📣 Cornerstone Network

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^{“It’s just much easier and more user friendly for the broker, but also it’s easy for the client as well. And that’s ultimately what it’s about, about making their process as easy as possible.”}

📣 Shaw Financial Services

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^{“It’s very easy from a management point of view, to manage the business and actually see what’s happening. It’s that kind of good overview not just of what I’m doing, but what the whole business is doing”}

📣 Mortgage Advice Brokerage

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2022

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2022 saw us ramping up our market share and growing our team’s headcount nearly 50%. We saw a 4X growth in our user base, helped over 25,000 homebuyers, and won our first award as the winner of the Best Digital Solution Provider at FinTech Futures’ Banking Tech Awards.

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We also closed in on some more funding from existing and new investors - no small feat in the current startup market!

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2023

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This year, five years on from the first line of Acre code being written, Acre will complete over £10 billion in mortgages for over 100,000 homebuyers.

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Acre has been voted number 23 in PropTech 50’s most innovative UK property tech firms and won Best Use of Blockchain Technology at the UK FinTech Awards. Our CEO, Justus has been recognised as one of Mortgage Introducer’s Innovator Champions of the Year and Acre have also been shortlisted in the MoneyAge and upcoming Mortgage Finance Gazette awards for Technology Provider of the Year.

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Most importantly, we’ve onboarded impressive, tech-lead firms, clubs and networks… with some announcements that will surprise and delight coming soon.

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In just over just five years, Acre has built a solution with the power to truly transform the mortgage industry - combining innovation, technology, and a commitment to simplifying the property-buying journey. So what’s next? We think one of the best times to be a disruptor is in a market downturn.

With a lot in our pipeline and our sights set on an even brighter future, Acre is more confident than ever that we can transform the way people buy homes!

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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.