It’s our mission to make money work for everyone. And this means helping find better solutions to some of life’s bigger financial decisions, as well as the everyday ones. That’s why we’ve been looking into how we can help you remortgage, which was one of the things we said we’d explore this year!
We’ve been testing an early version with 2,000 people and have learnt a lot from these first tests. Because right now we’re focussed on making Monzo Plus amazing, we won’t be launching remortgaging to more people immediately. But in the meantime, we wanted to share what we’ve been working on and what we’ve learnt so far.
Remortgaging is when you switch to a new deal
A remortgage is when you already have a mortgage but you switch to a new deal, usually to avoid paying higher rates when your introductory rate ends.
If you don’t change deal when your introductory rate ends then your mortgage provider will typically move you on to a much higher rate (known as a Standard Variable Rate, or an SVR). This is why people switch mortgage deals (remortgage) - it could save you a lot of money.
We started small so we could learn quickly
We teamed up with online mortgage broker Mojo to let homeowners get remortgage quotes and book an appointment with an expert Mojo advisor – all through the Monzo app.
We started with a small group of customers for this first test: individual mortgage holders who weren’t looking to borrow more money. This meant we could ship something quickly and learn if this was an area we wanted to invest more time in (we built everything in two weeks!)
We worked on a user-friendly journey
We got in a room with Mojo and mapped out what homeowners want and need from remortgaging. Mojo have great insights from their own research, so we combined our knowledge from speaking to Monzo customers and sketched out an in-app user journey that lets customers get personalised quotes and book a call with a Mojo expert.
From our research, these are the main user problems we identified and decided to tackle:
1. The process can be confusing, so we wanted to use clear language.
2. Remortgaging takes a long time, so we wanted to shorten the journey. We made sure customers only had to answer 12 questions before they could see a personalised quote from Mojo, which is super quick for mortgages.
3. It’s difficult to genuinely compare the deals you can get, so we wanted to make it easy. We used Mojo’s service which ranks deals based on the real overall price you’ll end up paying, not just the best interest rate.
We’ve tested it and learnt a lot!
The option to remortgage through Monzo has been live for nearly 2,000 people for about six weeks. The feedback has been generally positive, but we can make significant improvements too.
The main thing we learnt was that some customers didn’t think the deals were competitive, because we were showing deals ranked by Mojo by their true cost, not the best interest rate. This meant users could find deals elsewhere with lower interest rates, even if they weren’t necessarily the cheapest deals overall.
The aim of ranking deals by their true cost is to account for everything like cashback and product fees etc. so you can see what the best deals actually are. This is because lenders can sometimes offer deals with very low interest rates but high other fees that end up being more expensive for the customer.
We have a few ideas to address this problem, like explaining clearly how ranking by true cost works, or letting you see deals ranked by interest rate rather than true cost, if you want.
We also heard from customers who were interested in this feature but weren’t looking for a deal at the time, so some kind of reminder function might be useful.
Others said they had to leave the journey to get information to answer some of the questions, like how much they owed on their current mortgage. With some work, and your consent, we could pre-fill this information for you using your credit files.
What next?
The product squad who built the remortgaging test are now chipping in to work on Monzo Plus because we want to double down on it.
Once we’ve done this, we might return to remortgaging – armed with learnings from this experiment!
Keep track of our progress and share your feedback with us by following the Making Monzo roadmap!