Case study

Why Mortgages for Doctors chose Acre

Subscribe to our newsletter

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

About Mortgages for Doctors

‍

Mortgages for Doctors specialise, as you might expect from the name, in providing financial advice to those in the Medical profession (though they do also help non-medics). Due to some of the challenges that are particular to medical professionals, securing a mortgage can prove tricky and nuanced. For medical professionals, finding the time to get mortgage and protection advice when working hours can mean only being available at irregular or unsociable times of the day.

Having been frustrated by the lack of purpose-built CRMs for mortgage and protection advisors, and even delving into starting work on their own solution, Michael Harms found that Acre was already tackling a lot of the features he’d been looking for.

‍

Simplicity and Integrations

‍

Mortgages for Doctors were looking for a comprehensive system that integrates various processes and workflows into one single platform that is purpose-built for the mortgage industry, as opposed to a general IFA platform with features bolted on. Previously a lot of the processes and client communications were manual and made things admin-intensive. Acre helped to streamline a lot of these processes and bring everything into one place.

‍

“It’s like night and day because we went from creating our own process with four or five different systems, communicating with clients in lots of different ways and being more admin heavy, to all of a sudden having a system that controls every aspect of the process and ensures that you're compliant, ensures that clients are taken on a journey step by step, and also ensures the advice journey is coherent throughout the group”

‍

Client Engagement

‍

Client communication is a huge part of the advice process, especially when working with clients with huge time constraints on them, and Mortgages for Doctors was keen to make sure they were giving their clients a convenient, high-quality experience from onboarding, to walking clients through the process step by step by allowing them to easily share their information, through to communicating through the client portal messaging.

‍

“Fundamentally it’s about being able to engage with clients using calendar systems, booking systems, inviting the clients through text messaging and emails, allowing them to do a lot of the updating of information at a time that's convenient for them, even uploading their own identification. So it's all of those small little bits that all add up to become a very slick system that wasn't available in the open market elsewhere.”

‍

Efficiency and Capacity

‍

As with any good back-office software, the goal was to find a solution that brought more efficiency to the company and reduced the amount of manual processes that took time away from the more valuable aspects such as speaking to clients and securing great outcomes for them. Acre has helped to handle increased volumes while still maintaining high quality service.

‍

“You've brought huge efficiencies to the business. So instead of me having to go and find another member of staff to service clients or more administrative support to combine all of those various other systems we would otherwise be using, we now don't need to do that.”

‍

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.