Legal & General, through its fintech business, has extended significant support to mortgage intermediary platform Smartr365.
The software as a service (SaaS) company gets not only a £3 million investment from the British insurer, but also strategic backing in the form of Legal & General fintech managing director Nick Frankland joining Smartr365’s board as a non-executive director. Part of the funds will go toward the continued development of LendrConnect, an application programming interface (API) service within Smartr365 designed to enable brokers to submit mortgages direct to lenders without having to re-key data.
“The objective of Smartr365 is to support the whole mortgage advice market by leveraging the benefits of technology to drive value and efficiency, thereby allowing intermediaries to process more volume, while delivering a smoother process for customers,” noted Smartr365 director Conor Murphy. “The Smartr365 platform takes the administrative heavy lifting away from advisers, typically condensing 10 hours of work down to just one hour, and allowing the focus to be the provision of sound advice.
“Legal & General’s decision to invest is a huge endorsement and major milestone for Smartr365. Their experience and expertise in helping to scale technology-based businesses will be instrumental in allowing us to drive the business forwards.”
Established in 2016, Smartr365 supplies systems to the UK mortgage intermediary market.
“We are huge supporters of the adviser market at Legal & General and recognise that they are invaluable in helping people through the home financing process,” said Frankland. “But we also recognise that they have to work very hard managing the administration when they could be using technology to free up their time and help more customers.
“Within the fintech business in Legal & General we look for opportunities to help markets on the journey from analogue to digital, especially where the customer experience can be improved as well. Smartr365 offers us the perfect platform to combine both of these aims and help the entire mortgage industry.”
