A Brief History of Smartr365

Smartr365 was born from the idea that technology could help (rather than hinder) advisers to get closer to their clients and help them make smarter financial decisions. Most advisers spend a huge amount of time during the mortgage process doing paperwork, and endlessly inputting the same data. Smartr365 led by founder, Conor Murphy, believed that there must be a smarter way to do mortgages, by automating the process through a simpler end-to-end digital platform powered by a suite of useful tools.

Having run Capricorn since 2005 and OCC Finance since 2011, Conor had a pretty unique vantage point across the entire mortgage industry and he understood that whilst OCC Finance offered one of, if not the best, CRM functionality within the mortgage industry, this alone would not be sufficient in the new world. The future was automation – in all parts of the mortgage process – including ID, income and address verification but most importantly in-application submission, and connecting up all the parts of the journey in one place. From this vision came Smartr365, which was legally formed in late 2016.

From humble beginnings, Smartr365 started to scale rapidly following investment from Fig VC in December 2017. In March 2018, Smartr365 announced an industry-first API integration to Halifax (the largest mortgage lender in the UK). This shook up the whole industry and opened everyone else to the benefits that technology could deliver. The vision and scale of Smartr365’s ambition was recognised by Legal & General, who came on board as our largest external investor in August 2018. This allowed us to further scale the team, rapidly progressing from 10 people, to 35, with new business functions, including Sales, Operations, HR and Finance.

Late December 2018 also saw our ‘soft launch’ with over 20 broker firms joining the platform. The first half of 2019 saw the delivery of some major new functionality, including SmartrDoc, MortgageKanban and SmartrCompliance. Work continued during 2019 on lender integrations with live testing with a Top 6 lender starting towards the end of 2019. These successes, coupled with further investment from L&G allowed Smartr365 to invest in their own dedicated office space in the summer of 2019, bringing all functions under one roof for the very first time.

Now ‘set up for success’ in all areas, and with a growing user-base the future looks bright indeed for Smartr365.