Life at Score

Meet Ollie, Our Customer Success Team Lead

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Meet Ollie, a Team Lead who joined Acre's Customer Success Team in 2023.

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‍What attracted you to Acre, and your Customer Success role?

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‍I’ve spent my career to date supporting startups across FinTech, SaaS Logistics and even a world-first surf lake, so it’s safe to say I thrive in companies that are innovating, and supporting customers has come very naturally to me in those spaces. I also believe great customer experience comes from having a great product and Acre’s Customer Success role, appealed as a way to work closely with the product and solve customer problems.

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What’s your favourite part of your job?

In a relatively short time, I’ve risen from CSA to Senior, and now Customer Success Team Lead. I’m a driven person and Acre giving me the autonomy and creativity to tackle problems has seen us deliver some great work, as well as allowing me to be in the drivers seat for my own progression. It’s a meritocratic environment that rewards hard work and creativity and that’s been hugely rewarding.

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What does a typical day look like for you?

The team maintain a high responsibility for several areas: core support, webinars, knowledge base and training - so there is always a big pile of ‘to-do's’. I try and minimise meetings where not essential and this leaves the breathing room for creativity, project work or giving our firms the extra layer of attention they deserve.

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How does the team support each other?

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‍Collaboration is key! We’re a talkative bunch but this means always keeping each other in the loop with the latest features, support themes and collaborating on projects. We also strongly encourage cohesion between the Customer Success Team, and Product & Engineering, which has helped us massively reduce our escalation backlog. This also helps pass great technical knowledge into an ordinarily non-technical team.

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What’s your favourite thing about working at Acre?

It has to be the people! At all levels of the business, everyone is so approachable for help, answering questions or just to bounce ideas off people with different experience. And we all have a laugh too!

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Also the onboarding was great. I came to Acre with software experience but knew nothing about mortgages and I was apprehensive that it’s something you can just pick up, but the team had a great roadmap and continuing support to get me up to speed.

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And I can’t fail to mention the perks? Whole company trip to the South of France? Don’t mind if I do..

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‍What advice would you give to someone looking to apply for a Customer Success role at Acre?

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Acre is an incredibly rewarding place to work, in terms of opportunity and in the day to day perks and experience you’ll gain through being a valued member of the Acre team. Mortgage and technical knowledge is teachable, and those who really thrive at Acre are those who are coachable, have a strong work ethic, and push themselves to do better.

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What do you do outside of work?

If I’m not at work, I’ll be out on my bike! I live for good weather, so if I’m not cycling or exploring London, you’ll find me glued to a rock in 30°C heat somewhere in the Med! I like to keep fit and need constant stimulation so this year I started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and I’m trying to work on my Spanish.

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Hasta luego! 👋

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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.