Legal & General invests £3m in lendtech Smartr365
Legal & General’s (LG) fintech business has made a £3 million investment in Smartr365, a Software-as-a-Service firm which supplies systems to the UK mortgage intermediary market.
Smartr365 was established in 2016 to offer brokers a digital service for customers. It offers fact find, CRM and customer verification processes.
LG’s MD of Fintech, Nick Frankland, who will join the board of Smartr365 as a non-executive director, says it looks for “opportunities to help markets on the journey from analogue to digital, especially where the customer experience can be improved as well”.
Conor Murphy, director, Smartr365, says the new funding will be used for product development – such as its LendrConnect, a mortgage API service that allows brokers to submit mortgages.
The firm will also be making individual components available to other mortgage businesses and CRM providers.
According to Smartr365, its platform “takes the administrative heavy lifting away from advisers, typically condensing ten hours of work down to just one hour, and allowing the focus to be the provision of sound advice”.
As reported last year, LG created its new fintech business to build and buy into a range of companies.
LG says its fintech subsidiary Investments Discounts Online (IDOL), which was established in 1999, will form a key part of the new business area.
