Smart Money People's CEO on building societies, rate volatility, and how review data is reshaping lender accountability
Building societies are outperforming mainstream lenders on broker satisfaction, specialist lending demand is rising, and customer reviews are becoming a compliance tool as much as a marketing one.
That is the picture emerging from Smart Money People's H1 2026 Mortgage Lender Benchmark, and it is the lens through which Peer Jelendorf (pictured top), who became chief executive officer of the financial services review platform at the beginning of this year, is shaping the business's next chapter.
When Jelendorf joined, he discovered the business was considerably bigger than he had assumed. He had known Smart Money People by reputation, primarily through the British bank awards. What he found when he stepped inside was a business with 3.5 million customer reviews, 650,000 newsletter subscribers, and a dataset he describes as unlike anything else in the market.
"I didn't realise quite how big it is and what it does," he told Mortgage Introducer. "People often think of star ratings and maybe a bit of commentary, whereas in our case it's 16 data points, net promoter scores, fair value, policy understanding – a lot of very financial sector-specific questions."
What Peer Jelendorf inherited
Jelendorf succeeded Jacqueline Dewey, who led Smart Money People for nearly six years and oversaw its growth from a startup into an established data and insight business. He brings a background spanning Boston Consulting Group, GoCompare – where he worked across strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and operations – and Moneybox, where he served as one of the company's first commercial hires, managing savings rate pricing and overseeing the Lifetime ISA product.
That trajectory shaped how he thinks about value creation. "As long as you create value for customers and you have a way of monetising it, that's all it takes," he said. "It's a very simple recipe and it's very impressive how often businesses might not do it, or might start out doing it but then drift away from it."
His immediate focus is converting Smart Money People’s data advantage into deeper commercial relationships. Having begun meaningfully monetising its web traffic only around 18 months ago, there’s significant scope to build on this momentum. The insight capability – spanning bespoke consulting propositions alongside benchmarking – also presents a compelling opportunity to deepen and broaden partnerships across the mortgage and wider financial services sectors.
What the H1 2026 benchmark reveals
Smart Money People's H1 2026 Mortgage Lender Benchmark – now in its 16th edition – drew on feedback from 980 brokers across 510 firms covering 126 lenders, equivalent to 98.1% of UK gross mortgage lending by volume. Overall satisfaction held broadly steady at 4.22 out of 5, a marginal decline of 0.03 on the H2 2025 figure. The overall Broker Experience Index (BEI), which combines speed, service, digital tools and support, dipped slightly to 70.2 from 71.
Jelendorf's read on those numbers is broadly positive. "I think it's been a challenging market, and for providers to broadly stand still actually feels like a pretty good result, given they had to make tweaks to service and propositions," he said.
Building societies posted the highest BEI score of 73.6, displacing mainstream lenders, who ranked second at 70.8. Jelendorf said that gap reflects something Smart Money People has tracked consistently. "There's something around differentiating themselves through relationships, that's been a very consistent theme," he said. "What we've seen more recently, more pronounced, is this operational consistency and being very clear and reliable as partners."
For brokers placing cases across a market shaped by increasing client complexity, that reliability carries particular weight. "Brokers really value when a partner is accessible, can be pragmatic on the underwriting, and they know they can speak to someone who understands the case and is reliable," Jelendorf said.
What lenders are getting right on broker service
The benchmark's findings point to a shift away from speed as the primary measure of lender performance. "Historically, the answer would have been very straightforward – speed," Jelendorf said. "Over the last couple of years, that has moved over to things like confidence and familiarity with the product."
What brokers value most now is predictability. The certainty that advice given to a client in the morning will still hold by the afternoon. "Having that reliability of execution beats pure response speed," he said. "Product ranges are stable, business development managers (BDMs) are very responsive, technology is good, communication is good."
Rate volatility in the first half of 2026 sharpened that dynamic. The lenders that scored well were those that reduced uncertainty rather than added to it. Jelendorf also flagged a growing signal in the data around rising client complexity. "We're seeing there's a bit more of impaired credit within the industry, and various scenarios of slightly more stressed availability of credit where it doesn't really become just about rates, but a lot about consistency and specific lending criteria," he said.
Why reviews are now a conduct tool
Jelendorf drew a clear distinction between formal complaints data and what review data can tell lenders and brokers that complaints cannot. According to Financial Conduct Authority aggregate complaints data, home finance complaints fell 3.8% in H2 2025 to 75,658 – a fall that looks positive in isolation. But according to Smart Money People research, 74% of consumers read reviews before considering a switch to a new financial provider, while 84% say it's important that others have had a good experience before they buy a product or service. Complaints capture only the most extreme outcomes.
"Complaints tell you the most extreme picture when a process has really broken down," Jelendorf said. "Reviews can be a lot more subtle for the in-between experience, which ultimately is the vast majority of experiences for customers."
That positions review data as what he calls an early warning system, surfacing friction before it becomes a complaint trend, and providing evidence of Consumer Duty outcomes that regulators and compliance teams can use. Consumer Duty, which came into force in July 2023, raised expectations significantly around evidencing client outcomes. "There's definitely some organisations using review data to evidence Consumer Duty outcomes, highlighting regular frictions, using it as one way of evidencing that they're listening to customers," Jelendorf said. "But we're still quite early on that journey."
His ambition over the coming 12 months runs across two lines. The first is expanding how the insight capability is used by partners, moving beyond reviews as a marketing exercise into something that influences commercial decisions, product development, and brand building. The second is audience growth, converting traffic into commercially viable partnerships. For a business sitting at the intersection of consumer trust and broker-lender performance data, the opportunity is considerable.
"I think there's so much more we can do for partners," he said. "Making sure that we're seen as a data provider but also making it clear how much further up the value chain there are actually things we can provide."
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