- Can you give us an overview of your role at MQube?
My remit covers growth strategy, commercial development, go-to-market positioning, and partnerships, essentially how MQube communicates its value to lenders and the broader market. That means working closely with lenders and partners to understand their transformation priorities and helping them see where AI-driven technology can make a genuine difference.
A big part of my role is translating complex technology into practical outcomes for lenders and, ultimately, better experiences for borrowers. There's often a gap between what technology can do and what organisations understand it can do for them. Bridging that gap, and communicating that, is where I spend a lot of my time.
What makes the role particularly interesting is that I’ve sat across both MQube, the technology business, and MPowered, our live lending operation. That dual vantage point has given me a perspective on mortgage transformation that's both commercial and deeply operational.
- Could you give us some background on MQube and what makes the business different from other mortgage technology providers?
MQube develops AI-driven mortgage origination and decisioning technology. But the focus is never simply digitisation, it's intelligent automation and genuine operational transformation. There's a meaningful difference between putting a digital veneer on an old process and actually rethinking how that process should work from first principles.
The thing that truly sets us apart is that we’ve also operated a live lender. Because of that, we've not built technology in isolation. We’ve encountered the same operational pain points, broker journey friction, and underwriting challenges that our clients have faced every day. That means our technology has been continuously refined in a live lending environment rather than developed in the abstract.
When we talk to lenders about where automation genuinely adds value, or where product-market fit already exists, we're drawing on real operational experience. It’s a huge competitive advantage for us.
- The mortgage process can still be slow and complex in places. Where do you think technology is having the biggest impact for lenders and borrowers?
The most tangible gains are coming from reducing friction and manual administration. Mortgage operations have historically been document-heavy, labour-intensive processes, and AI is changing that meaningfully through intelligent document handling, automated data extraction, and underwriting support that helps advisers make faster, better-informed decisions.
For borrowers, this translates into faster decisions and more responsive journeys. People's expectations around speed and simplicity have shifted dramatically, driven partly by their experiences in other financial services. The mortgage sector has historically lagged behind, but the gap is closing.
The biggest impact, though, often comes from removing cumulative friction across the journey. Each individual improvement might seem modest, but the compounding effect on customer experience and operational efficiency is significant.
- Many lenders are still dealing with legacy systems and operational challenges. What are the biggest barriers to modernisation across the market?
The technical barriers are real: legacy systems, siloed data, and integration complexity create genuine challenges. But I'd argue that the more underestimated barriers are cultural and organisational.
We’ve seen ourselves that technology alone rarely transforms an organisation and our CEO, Stuart Cheetham has written before on the impact of good culture. The lenders making the most progress are those where leadership and people have genuine ambition around change and where there's alignment across the business, not just in the technology team.
Successful transformation requires operational evolution alongside the technical work. That means changing how teams work, how decisions get made, and how you measure success. Some organisations have the technology investment in place but haven't done the harder work of evolving how they operate around it.
The strongest organisations I encounter tend to combine genuine openness to change with a clear-eyed view of where they want to be. The technical challenges are largely solvable. The cultural ones take longer, but they're also where the most durable competitive advantages are built.
- What are lenders getting wrong when deciding whether to build technology internally or partner with specialists?
We’ve been focusing a lot on this with our messaging at MQube. The build-versus-buy framing itself can be misleading. The question shouldn't simply be "build or buy", it should be a question of where a lender (or any organisation) truly differentiates itself and where it has competitive advantage, or at least where it sees itself having competitive advantage.
Internal development can make absolute sense where a lender has a genuine, defensible competitive advantage to protect. The problem is that many organisations overestimate how many areas that actually applies to.
What tends to be underestimated is the ongoing burden. Maintenance, continuous iteration, the engineering resource required to keep pace with how rapidly AI is evolving, these are genuine costs that compound over time in ways that aren't always visible at the point of the initial build decision. Technology transformation is never a project with a finish line; it's continuous.
Specialist partners, like MQube, bring focused innovation bandwidth and accumulated expertise that's genuinely difficult to replicate internally, particularly as AI capabilities evolve quickly. The lenders who are thinking about this well are asking: where is our real differentiation and how do we allocate our capacity accordingly?
- Looking ahead, what trends do you think will shape the future of mortgage technology over the next few years?
The direction of travel is towards AI becoming genuinely embedded in everyday mortgage workflows, not sitting separately as an innovation initiative, but woven into how decisions are made, how cases progress, and how teams work. That shift from AI as a standalone capability to AI as operational infrastructure is where the most significant transformation lies.
We'll also see more connected, real-time mortgage ecosystems where data flows more freely between lenders, brokers, and third parties, enabling faster and more personalised customer experiences. The infrastructure for this is building and the benefits for borrowers will be considerable. Some of this is also down to market norms and regulation. Intermediation means that a lot of the heavy lifting is taken care of which means data sharing really needs to be facilitated better between a borrower and their intermediary, instead of their lender. Some existing technology, like open banking could be easier for consumers too but there is good progress happening right now, FCA sandboxes are giving start-ups a chance to work with regulators at a build stage and the team at HM Land Registry are working hard to make property searches easier.
The US market is instructive here. Where automation and seamless digital journeys have taken hold, customer expectations reset. Once borrowers experience a faster, simpler process, there's no going back to tolerating a two-week wait. The largest mortgage lender in the US is now a non-bank and that's not a coincidence.
Operational scalability becomes a genuine competitive advantage in that environment. The lenders who can serve more customers, more responsively, without proportionally increasing cost, end up in a structurally stronger position. And the firms pulling ahead won't be those who treat modernisation as a project with a finish line.
