Homes have been part of the Life Moments story from the beginning.
Back in 2018, we launched FirstHomeCoach, sprouting from a simple idea: rather than starting with mortgage products, start with what people actually need when they’re trying to buy their first home.
Since then, we’ve worked with banks, building societies, mortgage brokers and pension providers to build engaging homebuying journeys for millions of people. We’ve developed everything from affordability and savings tools to downsizing experiences. All the while, we ask the same question again and again: how can we make moving home better?
Now, we’re getting the opportunity to explore that question on a much bigger scale.
After working with Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) on reimagining small business engagement with lending, we are now part of its Smart Data, Open Property and Home Buying coalition. Our latest work with CFIT explores how data can be used to make moving home simpler and more connected, while making sure the customer experience and the trust needed to make it work, aren’t an afterthought.
This work sits within a broader money coaching ecosystem that we’ve built over the past eight years. For much of that time, people have challenged us: why aren’t you building a personal financial management solution, powered by open banking or open finance and aggregated customer data?
Our answer has consistently been that this isn’t where people should start. They need to be able to start anywhere. They need to build trust over time. And they need opportunities to learn, explore their curiosity and get something useful back in return.
That doesn’t make us anti-open finance. Quite the opposite. We think it can be incredibly powerful. But sequencing matters and open finance needs to appear at the right time and in the right place in the customer journey, rather than being the front door.
And that’s part of what makes this project so interesting.
What’s next?
The coalition is now entering its second phase, focused on how the industry works together to build trust into the infrastructure, as to enable data being shared efficiently between parties with every commercial reason to be cautious. Consumer trust is just as important. Without it, there’s no adoption, and without adoption, the infrastructure doesn’t matter.
This is another area where we think our experience is directly relevant, alongside the hard-won lessons from open banking and pensions dashboards. Does this need to be mandated, or can it succeed on commercial merit? How do we incentivise people to use it? And how do we measure success? We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we’d rather grapple with these questions in the open than assume someone else does.
One discussion from the group’s early sessions stayed with us, on transparency in decision making. Financial services has an extraordinary range of people with deep and varied experience. Bringing different disciplines and organisations together can bring the art of the possible to life, but only if motivations are on the table and decision making is transparent. It’s the same trust argument we make about customers, turned inwards on ourselves.
We are genuinely excited about this next phase of our work on homeownership. If you are exploring how data, trust and collaboration can make the homebuying journey better for everyone, we would love to have that conversation.
