Technology

How Acre's Simplify Conveyancing Can Help Your Brokerage?

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Conveyancing is a crucial step in almost every mortgage process in the UK.

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We recognise advisors’ pain points around finding high-quality conveyancing services which is why we’ve partnered with Simplify, the UK’s market-leading conveyancing and property firm.

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What is Conveyancing?

When a client is moving house, conveyancing is the legal transfer of property ownership from the seller to the buyer. For re-mortgages to a different lender, a charge over the property needs to be registered by a solicitor.

A conveyancing solicitor is also responsible for carrying out searches, ensuring the property is legally sound and highlighting any issues that may affect the mortgage. Without proper conveyancing, the buyer may be at risk of purchasing a property that has undisclosed liabilities, such as outstanding debts or legal disputes – or that might fall into a mineshaft!

This can cause significant financial and legal problems for the buyer in the future. Thus, conveyancing is an essential part of the mortgage application process that ensures the buyer is fully aware of the legalities involved in their property purchase and protects them from potential issues down the line.

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If everyone’s doing it, why is it such a problem?

Whilst everyone needs a conveyancer, and a lot of conveyancing is being done, not all of it is being done particularly well. Interminable delays, poor communication and inefficient processes lead to 42% of buyers being unsatisfied with their conveyancer.

Additionally, the way pricing is traditionally quoted for conveyancing is at best confusing, at worst downright obfuscatory. Myriad hidden fees, charges, disbursements and every other word a solicitor can think of to charge the client money are added on to an unrealistically low initial quote. This just adds to the frustration homebuyers feel towards the solicitors who are meant to be working for them.

Everyone involved in the home-buying process – brokers, clients, conveyancers and ourselves as software providers – have a vested interest in the process completing as quickly and painlessly as possible.

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That’s why we believe there’s a better way.

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Acre’s Conveyancing

We’ve worked with Simplify Conveyancing to build simple, transparent pricing for conveyancing services directly into the Acre platform. Because the advisor has discussed the case in great detail with the client whilst completing the fact find, we have all the information we need to provide an accurate, highly competitive quote to the client.

One of the other key reasons we’ve chosen to partner with Simplify Conveyancing is their excellent attitude to customer satisfaction. With a 4.3 rating on Trustpilot and a proactive approach to making sure clients understand the process and are kept fully informed, your client remains a happy client.

And the proposition for your client is excellent as well –with PPL’s no move, no fee guarantee, access to PPL’s excellent client portal eWay and great pricing on top of the market-leading customer satisfaction mentioned earlier, it’s no surprise they’re the UK’s largest conveyancer.

Once a conveyancing case is live in Acre, advisors can see live status updates directly from the system the solicitors use to manage the case. What’s more, perhaps most importantly, brokers have direct access via phone or online messaging to the solicitor who is managing their client’s case.

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This means that when you have the missing document the solicitor needs to proceed, or the client has got a bit confused and come back to you as their trusted financial advisor for help, you have the ability to actually sort things out.

Lastly, Simplify Conveyancing pay a generous commission to you for each successful referral via Acre, helping your bottom line.

Learn more

Want to see the conveyancing cases in action in Acre?

Get in touch with our business development team to find out how Acre’s Conveyancing can accelerate your business and improve your clients’ experience: https://www.acresoftware.com/demo

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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.