September 25, 2018
This month, we had the pleasure of getting to know Eliot Darcy, founder and CEO of Market Mortgage, a lending platform, working in partnership with retail lenders to provide high-LTV mortgages more efficiently to prime borrowers.
I grew up in Yorkshire then slowly migrated to London with work. I started my career at PwC where I trained as a Chartered Accountant and then spent 11 years in 2 different VC funds investing in early stage businesses. Half of my job was finding new investments, and the other half was working with entrepreneurs, trying to help them grow their business, so I guess that’s what gave me the bug to do something for myself.
I guess I’d spent the previous 14 years trying to learn what makes a business great and, probably more importantly, what makes it not great. You pick-up some pretty basic principles that can then be applied to any business.
The idea for Market Mortgage came when I was getting a mortgage for myself. I didn’t have much of a deposit so had to borrow at high-LTV. I was amazed how much more I was being charged for a mortgage, just because I didn’t have a big deposit, compared to my mate who had a deposit from his parents. He’s a good mate, so I can say this, but I’m much less likely to default on a mortgage than him, yet I was being charged so much more.
It annoyed me enough to try to figure out what the reasons were, then ultimately that lead to Market Mortgage.
Market Mortgage is basically a fund that enables banks and building societies to provide 95% mortgages more efficiently to the borrower.
The bit that excites me most about Market Mortgage is that it benefits everyone involved; no one needs to lose for the others to win:
No-one is doing what we’re doing currently but there’s a lot of innovation in the mortgage market now, lots of young companies trying to make the whole process better for the borrower, so its an exciting place to be.
Getting face-time with decision makers in the lenders and investors has been a challenge. They have people pitching new ideas to them every week, so what makes this different.
We’ve made a point of surrounding ourselves with advisors, board members and investors who have been at the top of their game and carry a lot of credibility in the industry. These guys have challenged us, challenged the product, bent it and flexed it until they’re convinced that its absolutely compelling. We’ve met a number of our target customers through this group of people. The customer knows that person wouldn’t be sitting with me if they didn’t properly believe in what we’re doing.
There are a number of start-ups entering the mortgage space at the moment. They’ve developed ways to make the mortgage process easier, cheaper and more streamlined for the borrower.
Since the credit crunch, there hasn’t been much innovation in this space from the private sector, so the government has done a great job in bridging that gap with the Help to Buy schemes. It feels like the private sector is starting to innovate more and creating more opportunities, so hopefully the private sector will start to take the lead and the government schemes won’t be needed as much. That’s probably a better outcome for everyone in the end.
We’re focused on the UK at the moment and, because the product gives lenders a competitive advantage, we’ve identified the few lenders that this works best for and we’re only working with them.
There are a few underlying fundamentals that drive the compelling need for the product though, and these are evident in a number of countries around the world. The next step would be to move internationally to Europe, Australia and the US.
In the early days, most of the time I spent on this was on the commute to my old job. I found a really good app to store all of my thoughts, Wunderlist; its basically a list-making tool that you can access from any device.
We’ve got a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old at home so they keep me active (and awake at night). You’re never going to get that time back, so I make sure that I’m part of their lives.
It works best for me if I make these things part of my routine. My wife works too so we share the drop-offs and pick-ups from nursery, I take them to clubs once a week, do bath-time as many times as I can. Then you can finish-off your work later in the evening if needed.
That applies to exercise too. I get changed in the office and run the first 4 miles of my commute home, rather than getting the tube. It only adds on about 15 minutes to my commute but I get half an hour of exercise.
If I didn’t make it part of my routine, it would just never get done.
Quick Fire:
Other than Market Mortgage, if you had to go into The Dragons Den right now, what would be your business idea? Go!
Its not my idea but it needs some more airtime. I’ve followed the development of artificial photosynthesis for years now, scientists trying to copy what a plant does in order to harness the energy from the sun. Last month some scientists in Cambridge made some big leaps forward. Hopefully it’s one to watch and might help us get out of a growing hole with the environment.
Favorite film?
Team America.
What is one of the things you would put on your “bucket” list?
Getting to space has to be on the list. That must be possible in my lifetime. Imagine the perspective you’d get from up there.
by Eliot Darcy