Please can you give us a brief overview of MagiClick and a little bit about your background.
MagiClick is a technology & design agency with a strong focus on the financial services sector. We have a team of over 200 based in offices in London, Istanbul and Dubai.
Our mission is to build next-generation financial experiences for a new generation of customers and our primary focus is on helping incumbent financial services companies innovate, adapt and hit back at the start-ups. I founded Dock9 in 2008 which grew into one of the leading digital solutions agencies for the financial services sector, and it was acquired by MagiClick at the end of 2020.
Over 80% of our clients are within the financial services sector and we’ve had the opportunity to work on projects for a wide range of companies within the UK mortgage market, including for OneSavings Bank, Foundation Homeloans, Nomo Bank, Castle Trust Bank, Vida Homeloans, Twenty7Tec, Acenden, Link Group, Kensington Mortgages and many more.
This work has given us unique experience in the sector working on transforming the experiences of borrowers, broker and internal teams through delivery of self-service portals, APIs, websites, mobile apps and chatbots.
In addition, last year we published our updated Mortgage Digital Transformation Playbook. We released the original version a few years ago and while the industry has made great strides in technology adoption and improved user experience there is still some way to go.
How has the design of digital journeys and customer experience developed over the last few years and how should providers review their customers’ digital journey and customer experience?
We’ve been working in the mortgage technology space for over 15 years’, and I think it’s fair to say, after a slow start, the last 3 years have finally seen a real acceleration in innovation in the sector.
This can be seen not just in the plethora of digital solutions now available seeking to improve the digital journeys for the customers of lenders and brokers like but also the wider initiatives to finally connect different parties in the mortgage journey together from a data perspective and markedly reduce the ned to rekey data
I think we can attribute this firstly to the technical groundwork for API connectivity which many lenders spent time laying over the past decade, which was in many cases an inward focussed exercise to begin with. This hard work in the background has started to enable some real innovation on the front end in recent years.
Secondly, while most of us would perhaps rather forget the events of 2020, a common theme of conversations with technology leaders at financial companies since that period is that there has been a lasting mindset shift, and the recognition that digital is not an option. The lessons learned from those intense few weeks adapting to the initial lockdown have not been forgotten.
Since 2021, the work we have been asked to undertake show that many companies have big plans to use digital to reinvent the operating model, starting with digitising previously manual processes as a first step, with a longer-term goal of moving from selling commodity products to delivering truly digitally enabled intelligent services.
In terms of reviewing your current digital journey and customer experience, a good place to start is to ask, “when did we last test our digital services with actual users?”
The most successful 'fintech' companies all have one thing in common: they leverage the power of User Research to avoid the trap of making decisions on a “hunch” when designing their products. It still surprises me just how many financial services companies still design and build digital services using a process that is fundamentally focused on the opinions of people within a business, and their understanding of the requirements.
Running a usability test in a controlled environment, with actual users, can often blow those assumptions out of the water. Organising a usability test and audit is often our first piece of work with a new client and can be a real eye-opener!
Precise have recently launched the first app of its kind which you developed for them; can you tell us more?
We kicked off a project with OSB Group over a year ago undertaking a ground-up review of the digital experiences that Precise offer with a focus on how Precise could deliver better broker and customer experiences, improve operational efficiency and take advantage of new opportunities to drive sales growth.
Broker research was central to this project and, as part of that work, we identified an opportunity to deliver a mobile app for mortgage brokers. It would be a first of its kind in the market and would ensure that wherever they are, brokers have the most up to date information at their fingertips.
The app doesn’t aim to replace the web-based broker portal, which is the natural place to get a full DIP and submit a case, but instead augments that portal by providing them with the information they need precisely when they need it, streamlining their processes.
Once a broker has downloaded an app on their iPhone or Android phone, they simply login with the same username and password that they use to access the web portal (so no separate registration is required). Once they login they can setup biometric authentication (via fingerprint of facial recognition), removing the need to enter their password again.
In addition to viewing up to date information on all of their cases within the app, brokers can enable real-time case update via push notifications on their phone – simplifying the process of Precise communicating with brokers and reducing the need for chaser calls and emails.
Additionally, it features customisable push notifications for case, criteria, and product updates, along with saveable criteria and calculator functionalities, further enhancing its convenience and usability.
I think the app also responds to wider changes in working patterns has changed in recent years, and the increasing importance of real-time app experiences to enhance the ability to work on the go.
To find out more, here's a video interview I did recently with Jon Hall, Group Managing Director of Mortgages and Savings at OSB Group - click here.
Looking into the future, where do you think technology take us in the next 5 years in the mortgage sector?
Life is very much more about accessing services on the move and traditionally most mortgage systems are very desk bound, and that just doesn't lend itself to today’s working practices. Therefore, enabling users to be much more in control, for example, the notifications on the Precise app was something that was really quite central to what the business wanted to do. Product withdrawals were another area, as brokers need to know what's happening now, whether new products are coming, including criteria changes.
Sometimes brokers can't get hold of an underwriter, but again with the Precise app, brokers in many cases don't need to now because of the direct connection to underwrites with real-time case updates. So that's really helpful and I think it is a shift in in the adoption of technology. There’s huge investment going on across the mortgage industry into technology and I don’t see this changing in the next few years.
