Insights: Can anyone fix homebuying?

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**Benjamin Ensor** (1:14)
Hello and welcome to Fintech Insider Insights. I'm Benjamin Ensor, Director of Research and Strategy at 11FS. Today we're exploring one of the biggest, most emotional, most expensive financial journeys most people ever undertake, buying a home. Now, we've been talking about fixing home buying for years. Property searches have moved online, mortgage applications have become digital, and buyers have access to more information than ever before. Yet, wherever you are in the world, the experience can often still feel broken.
Few years ago, we published a report about home buying, and we identified three recurring themes, complexity, a lack of transparency, and poor orchestration. So while the technology has continued to advance, many of those underlying challenges still remain. Buyers are still left acting as a project manager, chasing updates, and keeping the process moving between multiple providers. So today, we're going to ask what's changed, what still isn't working, and where can technologies like AI and better collaboration across the ecosystem make a big difference?
So to discuss this, I'm joined by three fabulous guests. First of all, I'd love to welcome Maria Harris, Chair of the Open Property Data Association and an advisor. Maria, welcome back to the show. Please can you remind listeners who've not come across you before a little bit about who you are and what you do?

**Maria Harris** (2:42)
Lovely to be back, Benjamin. Thanks for having me back on. So yes, Maria Harris, Founder and Chair of the OPD, which was a job that I fell into entirely by accident. Most people probably remember me from my work in mortgage lending, been in mortgages for the last 20 years, and was part of the team who built Attenbank, which was the UK's first digital bank and the first digital mortgage.

**Benjamin Ensor** (3:06)
Fabulous. Welcome back.
I'm also delighted to welcome Daniel O'Connor, Chief Operating Officer of LendInvest. Welcome to the show, Daniel. Please, could you also tell our listeners a little bit about you and a little bit about LendInvest?

**Daniel O'Connor** (3:21)
Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me on, Benjamin. I've spent 20 years in financial services, predominantly in full service banks in the UK and then laterally in Fintech. As you said, I'm CEO at LendInvest. We're a listed UK property finance platform that aims to bring together specialist expertise and technology to make property finance simpler.
We've lent over nine billion pounds on the platform since inception in 2008
That's in what we today define in the market as specialist mortgages, but we might get into that later in the conversation today. So that's predominantly bi-talent lending, residential bridging and development finance. My job here is essentially making sure the operating platform runs effectively, so the technology processes and the people that enable us to lend to those that are looking to buy a home or remortgage, as well as supporting them through the life cycle. For the last few years, we've been working hard as many have been on making that journey simpler and faster where possible for customers and broker partners that we engage with. But looking forward to the conversation today and to some of the constraints that remain in the market and how that needs to continue to evolve at pace at an industry level.

**Benjamin Ensor** (4:38)
Fabulous. Thank you for joining us.
I'm also delighted to welcome Lucy Wayment, Co-Founder of Wellness. Fantastic to have you joining us today, Lucy. Could you also tell our listeners a little bit about you and a little bit about wellness?

**Lucy Wayment** (4:53)
Yes, of course. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be part of this conversation. I'm Lucy and one of the Co-Founders of Wellness. We are on a mission to make financial advice affordable and accessible for women for the first time. We look at finances holistically, so that includes mortgage and home, as well as protection, pensions, investing, legacy. We're using AI to automate a lot of the compliance and admin that makes advice so expensive to deliver at the moment, so that we can make it more accessible to more women.