Moneysupermarket is launching a mortgage fintech (MONY)

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Moneysupermarket, a UK price comparison site for loans, mortgages, credit cards, and home and car insurance quotes, has revealed plans to launch its own mortgage fintech, dubbed Podium. It has teamed up with the founder of HD Decisions, which is a search engine for credit cards and loans that Moneysupermarket uses, for the new venture.

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Podium will be a digital comparison tool that helps consumers better search for mortgages, while enabling them to complete the mortgage application process online.

Moneysupermarket already has many customers who search for mortgages on its platform. Every year, the website attracts 16 million visitors who search its mortgage website, which amounts to around 25% of overall UK mortgage search traffic.

However, those customers generally leave the website and close their deals with third-party mortgage brokers. Such companies are often still very old school— they work with clients over the phone and rely on many paper-based processes that are inconvenient for customers. Podium wants to overhaul this process by completely digitizing it to streamline mortgage broker services for customers.

The company isn’t the first to digitize the mortgage process, but given its large customer base, it probably has an advantage over other new players. There are many other fintechs that are looking to revamp the mortgage market, including UK-based Trussle, so there will be competition for Podium.

However, Moneysupermarket is already an established player in the mortgage industry, which will probably make it more likely that consumers will use its new platform, as they may already use it to compare mortgages anyway. Podium’s chances of success thus appear quite high, and similar fintechs should beware of this new entrant.