Mortgage Wallet logo orange

Reimagining the broker-client relationship

Setting out with a vision to disrupt the mortgage industry’s status quo, we helped My Mortgage Brokers address the challenges faced by mortgage brokers, prototype realistic solutions and harness user feedback for a new digital companion app.   

Mortgage Wallet prototype homescreen

100%

of testers said the app would ‘simplify the mortgage/remortgage process'

6

weeks to produce a user validated high fidelity prototype

20%

reduction in average sign-up time

Introducing Adrian, Co-Director of My Mortgage Brokers 

After years working high up in the traditional financial service sector, Adrian and his business partner Chris set out to create My Mortgage Brokers with a vision: to make faceless, jargon-packed and intimidating experiences with mortgage brokers a thing of the past. 

With Adrian and Chris priding themselves on creating personalised stress-free customer experiences, they wanted to grow their brand of expert, transparent and no-nonsense mortgage services throughout the UK.   

The Challenge 

  • Streamlining communications in one place for mortgage brokers and customers 
  • Giving customers greater transparency of the mortgage application process 
  • Reducing broker admin by facilitating digital self service 

My Mortgage Brokers had gone from strength to strength, having opened two offices in the north west and delivered their brand of personalised service to thousands of homeowners across the UK. 

But with scale came challenges. Adrian noticed that as they grew from a local brokerage into a national organisation their ability to maintain excellent customer experiences was going to hit roadblocks.  

Communicating with a higher number of customers across multiple channels (email, Facebook messages, WhatsApp and SMS) would create a lot of time-consuming admin.  

So much so that Adrian was reaching a point where the juggling of work became unsustainable and started to affect business.  

The potential ramifications on customers were huge; slower or less consistent communication with customers would leave them feeling in the dark about their progress, harming customer experience and ultimately making them less likely to return. 

Mortgage Wallet app prototype dashboard

The Problem Statement 

With Adrian’s challenge clear, My Mortgage Brokers asked themselves; 

How might we digitise the customer and broker process to create ease of use and transparency for both parties, facilitating better user experiences and helping to scale faster? 

Luckily, they were speaking our kind of language! Check out how we helped them… 

The Solution 

To ensure the team were setting out to build the right product and not spending resources on features that wouldn’t add value, Adrian focused on gathering user insights to avoid decisions led by assumptions alone. 

To validate the concept quickly, we committed to a 6-week sprint with a view to ideate, prototype and test at speed.  

 

Discovery and Stakeholder Interviews 

First, to uncover customer and broker challenges and concentrate efforts into areas that bring maximum benefit for My Mortgage Brokers, we kicked off with a collaborative stakeholder interview. This identified these key areas: 

  • Homeowners want visibility on their mortgage’s progress 
  • Homeowners demand good communication from their broker 
  • Homeowners expect simplicity in how they access mortgage information 

 

Design, Prototyping and Testing 

Embedding this information into every decision across our 6-week sprint format, we were able to produce a fully interactive prototype that was validated with real users and ready for development. 

Together with Adrian and his team, we crafted a working prototype of what would later become Mortgage Wallet, including: 

  • A progress indicator that communicated the customer’s progress at a glance. User testing would later show this to be the most important feature within the app. 
  • A built-in chat that negated the need to communicate outside of the app through emails or phone calls. 
  • An account-specific document storage that holds all information related to a customer’s mortgage in one place. 

Results / Outcomes 

6

weeks time taken to produce a user-validated, high-fidelity prototype

100%

of users said they felt safe holding mortgage information on the app

100%

of users felt the concept would ‘simplify the mortgage/remortgage process’

20%

reduction in average sign-up time after the first sprint

50%

reduction in time taken to find the in-app chat after the first sprint

From our initial discussions, it was clear that Pixeltree aligned closely with our vision. They demonstrated a deep understanding of our goals, particularly in crafting a user interface that reflects our objectives. The collaboration has been both exciting and productive, and we are confident that this is only the start of a successful partnership.
Jared Richardson My Mortgage Brokers

Meet the collaborators!

Our team was on hand to support Adrian, Jared and the team at every stage in building Mortgage Wallet.  

From amassing piles of sticky notes on broker/customer pain points to reviewing the user feedback recordings, each success and setback is shared and tackled together. One team. One vision. 

The team that collaborated for this project from both Mortgage Wallet and Pixeltree

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