Matt McAllister from Mortgage Propeller joins the show to talk about bringing a new fintech to life in the middle of a pandemic, buying a house with a credit card, making lives easier for mortgage brokers and borrowers, talking to your customers way before they become your customers, life lessons from Bebo…and working through the night with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on in the background!

This episode of MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

Matt is the founder and CEO of Mortgage Propeller, a UK-based fintech that makes mortgage brokers more efficient and their businesses more profitable, by addressing compliance and lead generation. He’s got a firm belief that the mortgage application process shouldn’t take the joy out of buying a home. Matt is an entrepreneur and a fintech veteran armed with an MBA, and his 20-year career has spanned financial derivatives, property, online gaming and retail entertainment. Matt and Pete met back in 2017 while working together in another fintech startup, so this MoneyNeverSleeps interview is our longest to date at just over an hour as it’s been brewing for years!

HIGHLIGHTS:

On the word ‘entrepreneur’: “For most of 2020, I was an unemployed entrepreneur! The word doesn’t sit well, we didn’t use it when we were kids, and maybe social networks made it popular. The word itself, park it – I feel like you’re not an entrepreneur until you’ve done something. If you’re always trying to duck and dive, hustle and make something happen, and you haven’t achieved it yet, and you haven’t built a company, then it feels like you’re cheating [by calling yourself an entrepreneur].”

On figuring out what to do with his life while listening to a guru guest speaker in his MBA program: ”Think of the thing you do, whatever it is, that you lose track of time when you’re doing it. That’s what you’re meant to be doing with your life. Mortgage Propeller is the only thing I could be doing. It’s not 'work', it’s just something I should be doing. Working for someone and doing a normal 9-to-5 is not for me.”

On early validation: “We started talking to firms across the UK, and lo and behold, people were really interested in what we were showing them. We were talking to the problems that they have – compliance, lead generation, speed and inefficiencies of completing an application process – and slowly but surely we started to get interest and some soft commitments. We just kept grinding and grinding through the summer until we felt like we had enough validation to start raising money.”

You can get in touch with Matt McAllister at [email protected]

Episode title inspired by ‘Props’ by Pete Rock

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