Industry

How Acre can support your consumer duty implementation plan

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What is Consumer Duty?

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The FCA Consumer Duty is a new regulatory initiative in the retail financial services industry. Its main goal is to ensure that customers receive good outcomes from financial products and services. This includes fair value, clear communication, and easy access to customer support. Firms must demonstrate evidence of consistently delivering positive outcomes for customers. This involves having a solid consumer duty implementation plan.

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This is how the FCA outline the main outcomes for Consumer Duty:

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Products and services should meet the needs, characteristics and objectives of their target customers.
Products and services are priced in a way that provides fair value, with prices reflecting the benefits to the consumer.
Consumers should be communicated with in a way that helps them understand and make effective, informed decisions.
Consumers should receive support that meets their needs for the entire life of the product or service.

We’re going to look at how this will impact Mortgage advice, and how Acre’s broker CRM software can make it simple to deliver these outcomes, and help you implement your consumer duty implementation plan.

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Great brokers generally already satisfy Consumer Duty!

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We believe that good brokers, who prioritise the needs of their clients, will already be acting in a way that’s compliant with the FCA Consumer Duty. They provide advice that is suitable for their clients' circumstances, ensuring that clients understand the products they’re purchasing, and offer ongoing support as needed.

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However, with the introduction of the FCA Consumer Duty, it’s more important than ever for firms to tighten their processes and checks. This is where the idea of having a consumer duty implementation plan comes into play.

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In a recent survey of mortgage firm managers, we found that only about 50% of respondents had a comprehensive implementation plan for consumer duty ready for the rollout. While a lot of the remaining respondents had begun planning for it, it was clear that putting together a plan was a bit of a pain point for firms.

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How Acre CRM software helps mortgage and protection brokers deliver great customer outcomes:

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When demonstrating our platform to managers and advisors we get a lot of questions around “How will Acre help us with consumer duty?”

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Acre Broker CRM software has always been designed to help mortgage brokers and protection advisors deliver great outcomes for their clients, and we’ve taken a particular focus when it comes to making Consumer Duty simple and baked into your process.

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Here are some of the features:

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Our mortgage broker software provides comprehensive requirements-gathering through the fact find and client portal, making it easier to capture a full picture of their client's situation. This allows brokers to focus on better understanding their client's particular circumstances and needs, which is critical for providing suitable advice.
Acre CRM makes it easy for brokers to advise on additional financial products that are important for holistic financial advice. These include Protection, General Insurance, Wills and more, meaning brokers can ensure clients have more optionality and understand how to better arm themselves in an increasingly confusing financial world.
Acre provides better reporting on the penetration of product types, meaning firms can audit whether there are gaps in what they're providing their clients. This helps brokers ensure they’re delivering positive outcomes to their clients in a consistent and reliable way.
Acre's mortgage and protection suitability report is built automatically based on the data in the case, meaning less manual note-taking and chances of missing information. When paired with clients being able to review and sign their suitability reports in the client portal, it's never been easier to help customers understand the products they're being advised on.
Acre mortgage sourcing drills deeper into requirements and criteria than any other mortgage software, and automatically saves evidence of research for detailed audit trails. This gives brokers more confidence that they’re giving advice that’s tailored to their clients' needs, and helps ensure positive consumer outcomes.
Acre software also sets automatic reminders to re-engage clients at key points. This helps brokers maintain a positive relationship with their clients and ensures that they are providing ongoing support throughout the life of their products. In the future, we plan to introduce additional features to the client portal that will keep clients engaged at various points such as when their mortgage agreement is due for renewal or when they might be interested in other financial products or services, further enhancing the customer experience and keeping clients informed.

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Want to know more?

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The FCA Consumer Duty is an important initiative that aims to raise the level of consumer protection and foster a culture of good outcomes in the financial industry.

If you’re not currently using Acre and want a full tour of the features mentioned above and more, simply book a demo here and let us know what your specific concerns are, and we’ll put together a tailored demonstration of the platform.

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If you’re already using Acre and want to discuss how it can fit into your consumer duty implementation plan, feel free to reach out to your account manager at any time!

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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.