Life at Score

Meet Kenza, our Head of Customer Success

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Meet Kenza, our Head of Customer Success. Kenza joined Acre to start our Customer Success team back in September 2019. We spoke to Kenza on her 3-year “Acre-versary”.

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What made you want to join Acre?

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I came across Acre while attending an event organised by Founders Factory, the venture studio. I loved the idea of doing something about mortgages as that was the one area of Finance that had seen little technology disruption at the time. That’s what drew me to the company to start with.

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I then met some of its early joiners, whose talent and passion about the problem Acre was trying to solve, in addition to confidence with regards to what I could achieve there despite not having prior Customer Success experience on paper, convinced me that this was the place where I should go next.

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What does a typical day look like for your team?

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The Customer Success team covers everything from brokers’ onboarding, support, training, content creation, to looking after our customers from day one and ensuring that they’re successful in adopting and using our platform. We know our clients really well and advocate for them if we feel that certain improvements to the platform are needed to help them use Acre better and more efficiently.

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What were you doing before?

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I was an investment banker for a decade in my previous life! So different from what I am doing now but such a great experience that’s made me the client fanatic person that I am today.

I started in Trading and Sales then moved to the Origination division of my former employer.

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Banking taught me a lot from delivering the best service to customers to being able to analyse complex situations and bringing them to a successful resolution efficiently. I gained transferable skills that I am using in my role every day.

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After a few years, I started thinking of exploring the start-up space that I had been attracted to for a while. It took me 3 years to decide to make the leap. Fintech was then an obvious move given my background.

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What superhero power do you bring to the team?

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It’s probably omnipresence. Being in this position literally requires me to be everywhere and wear different hats, whether working with the team to ensure our day-to-day Customer Success operations run smoothly, discussing users’ feedback with our Product team to provide an additional angle when defining our roadmap or being there for our customers ensuring that we deliver the best service to them to state a few.

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That technically means that I should be working around the clock, but my superpower allows me to perform that in less than 24 hours a day! :)

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What career advice would you give to someone looking to follow in your footsteps?

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Don’t let anyone make you think that you won’t be succeeding in your aspired career move and that you’d be better off remaining where you are. You’ll meet a a lot of sceptics that like to remain in their comfort zone.

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Don’t let them discourage you and listen to your inner voice. “You’re not ready. You don’t know enough. This isn’t the right environment for you. You’ll fail in your move. Your experience is irrelevant”. I heard that when looking to make my career transition so many times! I kept going regardless. You might hear the same but be confident in your skills while remaining conscious of your development areas.

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You’ll meet amazing and passionate people along the way who will be happy to guide you and give you good advice. Take the time to learn about the industry and meet as many people as you can, not so they give you a job, but rather so they suggest additional areas to explore. Do some studies if you think that’s necessary but not because you feel that you have to. Choose a company that takes a view on what you can deliver and sees beyond what you’ve achieved so far. 

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Once you’re settled in your new role, never forget to keep an eye on talent attempting to make a similar move and help other people join the Fintech movement!

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.