The mortgage market has changed considerably since Fitch & Fitch began advising customers. What has not changed is the value of having an experienced adviser understand someone’s circumstances and help them navigate an important financial decision.
What has changed is almost everything that happens before that conversation.
Today, people increasingly begin their mortgage journey online. They want to get an initial sense of what they may be able to borrow, understand the costs involved, test different scenarios and find answers to early questions before they are ready to speak to an adviser.
We saw an opportunity to build a mortgage experience around that behaviour rather than asking customers to adapt to the traditional way of doing things.
That was the thinking behind Muttuo Mortgages.
Why the mortgage journey needed to evolve
Mortgage advice has traditionally centred around the adviser conversation. A customer gets in touch, explains their circumstances and begins working through the options that may be available to them.
That personal interaction remains incredibly important because mortgages rarely fit neatly into a simple set of rules. Income, employment, existing commitments, credit history, deposit size, property type and lender criteria can all affect what someone may be able to do.
However, customers increasingly want to understand more before that first conversation takes place.
They may want to know whether their deposit is likely to be enough, how a lender could view their income, what a particular loan-to-value means or whether changing mortgage rates could affect their options. Being able to answer some of those initial questions independently can make the wider mortgage journey feel much less daunting.
That does not make professional advice less valuable. Instead, it allows technology and information to handle some of the early research, leaving the adviser to focus on the areas where experience, interpretation and individual circumstances matter most.
Building Muttuo around that change
We created Muttuo Mortgages to bring those different parts of the journey together.
Muttuo is a digital-first mortgage brand and trading style of Fitch & Fitch Ltd. It has its own identity and customer experience, but behind it sits the mortgage knowledge, systems and adviser expertise we have developed through Fitch & Fitch.
The aim was never simply to build another mortgage website.
We wanted to create somewhere people could genuinely begin their journey: answering early questions, using practical tools and developing a clearer understanding of their position before deciding when they wanted expert help.
That thinking can be seen throughout the Muttuo Mortgages platform, from the way information is organised to the tools customers can use before making an enquiry.
It also gives us another way to deliver mortgage advice without losing the personal support at the heart of the wider business.
Using technology where it adds value
There are parts of the mortgage journey where digital tools can make a real difference.
A calculator can help someone understand their loan-to-value or explore an initial affordability scenario. Clear mortgage guidance can explain why lenders may assess income differently, how deposit size could influence borrowing options or what someone may need to consider when approaching the end of a mortgage deal.
Muttuo’s mortgage calculators and digital tools are designed to make that research easier and give customers a useful starting point.
There is, however, a limit to what any calculation can tell you.
Mortgage lending depends on individual circumstances and lender criteria. Someone may appear to fit a particular scenario based on an online result, but their income structure, credit profile, property or wider financial position could materially change the options available.
That is where adviser expertise becomes particularly valuable.
For us, the best digital experience should help customers reach better questions. Experienced advice can then help them reach better decisions.
Starting with the customer, not the terminology
One of the areas we wanted to rethink was the way mortgage information is organised.
The mortgage industry naturally speaks in product categories, lending criteria and technical terminology. Customers do not necessarily begin there.
They begin with a situation.
Can I afford my first home? Should I remortgage when my current deal ends? Could I finance another rental property? What options might I have later in life?
Those are much more natural starting points than expecting someone to know which mortgage category applies to them before they have even begun their research.
Muttuo has therefore been structured around the things customers are actually trying to achieve. People can find information relevant to buying their first home, moving house, remortgaging, investing in property or considering borrowing later in life, then move towards personalised advice as their circumstances become more specific.
It is a relatively simple change in approach, but one that can make navigating mortgage information feel much more intuitive.
What Muttuo means for Fitch & Fitch
Creating Muttuo did not mean moving away from what Fitch & Fitch had already built. In many ways, it gave us an opportunity to take that experience further and make it accessible through a different kind of mortgage journey.
Fitch & Fitch continues to focus on highly personalised advice, including specialist residential, investment and high-value lending through Fitch & Fitch Private Office.
Muttuo complements that approach by giving customers more freedom to begin digitally, whether that means answering an early question, checking some figures or building their understanding before they speak to someone.
It also gives us room to think differently about how mortgage information, technology and advice fit together, while Fitch & Fitch continues to serve customers who value a highly personal and often more specialist advice experience.
The two brands therefore do not represent an old way and a new way of arranging a mortgage. They offer different routes into the same underlying expertise.
We have explained how Fitch & Fitch and Muttuo work together in more detail for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between the two propositions.
What we have learnt from going digital
Building a digital-first mortgage experience has also made us look more closely at parts of the customer journey that can easily be taken for granted.
When information is available immediately, customers expect it to be clear. If a calculator produces a result, they need to understand what that number does and does not tell them. When someone moves from research into advice, the transition should feel natural rather than as though they are starting again.
Those expectations have encouraged us to think carefully about how mortgage information is explained and where unnecessary friction can be removed.
Sometimes that means something as simple as presenting a calculation more clearly. In other cases, it means recognising that a customer searching for an answer may not yet know the industry terminology used to describe their situation.
It has also reinforced the importance of context.
A number on a screen can be useful, but it cannot understand why someone is moving, how their income may change, what they want from a property or how comfortable they feel taking on a particular commitment.
Digital tools work best when they make those conversations easier rather than trying to remove them altogether.
That is one of the most important lessons we have taken from building Muttuo: convenience matters, but so does knowing when technology has reached the limit of what it can usefully do.
The next chapter for mortgage advice
We expect the way people research and arrange mortgages to continue evolving.
Customers will have access to more information, more sophisticated tools and increasingly personalised online experiences. As a result, expectations around clarity, convenience and speed are likely to keep rising.
For Fitch & Fitch, the opportunity is to respond to those expectations without losing the qualities that make good mortgage advice valuable in the first place.
That is where Muttuo fits.
It gives customers more control over the beginning of their journey while allowing experienced advisers to focus on the moments where individual circumstances, lender knowledge and judgement matter most.
For us, that represents a natural next chapter for Fitch & Fitch: taking the knowledge and personal service that have shaped our business and finding new ways to deliver them to the customers of tomorrow.
You can explore Muttuo Mortgages, its digital tools and mortgage services to see how that approach works in practice.
Muttuo Mortgages is a trading name of Fitch & Fitch Ltd, an appointed representative of JLM Mortgage Network Ltd, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under registration numbers 955014 and 300629.
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