One day Elena Gutierrez had a thought: "When issuing loans today, banks behave as if they are doing you a favor. What if we turn everything upside down and force the banks themselves to fight for the customer's attention?" It is this idea that underlies the startup Colibid, co-founded by a young entrepreneur from Burgos.
Colibid is a fintech company that tries to make mortgage loans easier and cheaper for ordinary people by forcing banks to enter into blind competition among themselves for the opportunity to sign a person to their offer.
In a sense, the platform works more with attention to banks than to customers. They are offered clients and a commission for intermediary services is taken from them. Ordinary citizens are only required to provide their data to the platform to create their profile. No going from bank to bank, from one window to another. Banks will compete with each other, offers more favorable conditions.
In a situation of constantly rising prices and living expenses, falling incomes of the population and rising interest rates on lending, opening a mortgage loan to purchase a roof over your head is becoming more and more difficult. A fresh pile of problems with an extremely likely global recession, the first news of which was the situation with Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse.
The solution offered by Guriettes and her companies is more than ever in handy today. At the moment, Colibid already has more than 20,000 applications for a mortgage loan, the total amount of which exceeds 3.5 billion euros. At the same time, there are also many banks ready to fight for these applications.
How exactly does the Colibid platform work?
Let's say that a person wants to open a new mortgage or refinance an old one. He registers for free on the platform by filling out a fairly simple form with his personal data. Everything you need for a potential loan application.
Based on this data, an anonymous profile is created without a name, contact details and other information that may allow the bank to understand who they are dealing with. In particular, anonymity allows you to prevent banks from, let's say, pursuing specific persons of interest to them.
What is the benefit?
An anonymous profile is placed on the platform, accessible to banks. Any banks. The profile can receive an unlimited number of offers and they are visible to other banks. Banks interested in the profile will compete with each other, offering a potential client more and more favorable conditions.
For example, an offer from one bank for a mortgage with a fixed 4% may be outbid by a similar offer, but at 3.5%. The client decides which of the offers he chooses. At the same time, brokers can compete with banks, so the wealth of choice for a potential borrower is really great.
Creating competition to lower prices
In such a situation, a person no longer needs to beat the thresholds of banks himself and rely on the advice of consultants that it is "a loan from bank X is the best offer that you can find on the market". The market itself comes to a person and is available in a few clicks.
