Both Trussle and Habito are competing with human brokers who they claim look at fewer than 10% of the mortgages available on the market and take weeks to process applications. But can these digital mortgage advisers really replace human brokers with their years of experience in the industry? “No!” Habito’s CEO and founder Daniel Hegarty told The Memo. “Machines are great at spotting patterns, doing arithmetic and moving data around – but human expertise will remain a key component of a market this complex for some time to come.” Hegarty says Habito is designed to make intelligent decisions based on data and subtleties in the market, so if you’re more concerned about completing a transaction quickly over the eventual cost, Habito will be able to account for this. “We have developed a very granular understanding of the emerging patterns in the market and how they can help or hinder potential applicants – it’s machine learning for the mortgage market.” He also says that Habito’s system uses machines to fill out all the application forms that a human broker would typically have to do. It’ll likely be years before using an online broker to sort out your mortgage becomes mainstream, as nearly 70% of all property deals today use a human broker, but Trussle and Habito are fighting to change that.
Multi-million pound tech start-ups, Habito and Trussle, recently introduced robo-advisers to compete with human brokers for a share of the UK’s lucrative multi-billion pound mortgage market. Habito claims to have created a unique algorithm that instantly searches over 100 mortgages to find the best deal for both first- and second-time buyers while Trussle’s technology compares current borrowers’ mortgages with 10k+ similar products to help them manage their finances in a more effective manner. Both companies suggest that machine learning’s ability to identify data patterns and subtleties in the market could result in significant time and cost savings. The UK is also home to some of Europe’s most innovative startups. as currently 70% of mortgages are still found in the traditional way.