Shopping for a home loan? This bond originator pays you back up to R25,000

'Self-service' allows clients to benefit from taking full control of the process says MortgageMarket founder Tim Akinnusi.

"We Pay You Up To R25,000 Back. Guaranteed!"

That's a slogan sure to catch your eye if you're shopping around for a mortgage.

MortgageMarket.co.za promises hard cash back just for using its platform to get a home loan.

The company's founder and CEO is Tim Akinnusi, former MD of ABSA Home Loans.

What's exciting about us is that we don't only allow you to compare the market and get the best deal; we give you hard cash back for self-serving, really.
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

Bruce Whitfield finds out more from Akinnusi on The Money Show.

We've actually put together a front-end and an interface to the average customer where they can make their own application to all the banks in real time.
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

We give them a really good incentive to apply by themselves, which is an amount of up to R25,000 in real cash!
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

Akinnusi says buyers actually benefit from taking on more responsibility from the get-go as opposed to having their hands held.

It allows customers to confront their income and their expenses and to really know what they're getting themselves into.
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

History has shown, the more individuals take ownership and empower themselves in the start of this journey, the less likely they are to actually go into default when it comes to understanding what the mortgage is about.
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

Akinnusi recalls the "eureka moment" which led to the founding of MortgageMarket, after he'd been headhunted to return to Nedbank to start an online application division for home loans back in 2012.

I'd just come out of doing my thesis for my MBA and part of what I did was to use a lot of those learnings and to put that into a practical idea that an individual could go online, engage directly with the bank and actually get a response back from a bank.
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

People thought we were crazy because, like you rightly said, a home loan is probably a product that you would associate with handholding, with complexity, and all we did was actually just simplify the front-end and we re-engineered the back-end to prioritise home loans and we created a product out of that to say that you could get bond approval within hours.
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

I thought, if that could work for one lender, why couldn't the same thing work for a multitude of lenders where an individual could make one application that goes out in real time to all lenders?
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

After moving to Absa for about a year, Akinnusi thought the time was ripe for him to advance the industry, as he puts it.

I couldn't resist it. I knew that if I didn't step out of corporate to actually execute this, somebody else was going to do it and I was going to be living in that good old-fashioned regret 'I saw this coming, I didn't do anything about it...'.
Tim Akinnusi, Co-founder and CEO - MortgageMarket.co.za

Listen to Akinnusi in conversation with John Maytham: