Pivotal's Believe Loans posts 121% lending growth via AI-driven CRM

UK mortgage consolidator Pivotal reports specialist lending growth at ten times the market rate, backed by AI-powered workflow investment.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Thu, 27 August 2026

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Pivotal, the joint venture between LSL Property Services and private equity firm Pollen Street Capital, says its Believe Loans division has grown second-charge mortgage lending by 121% year-on-year since joining the group in September 2025, vastly outpacing a UK market that UK Finance estimates expanded by roughly 10–11% over the same period.

The Believe Loans team, which originated from a 2017 specialist broker and integrated an AI-powered CRM platform through a 2019 merger with Click Tech, credits a combination of workflow automation and adviser capacity for the surge. End-to-end conversion rose by 120% between January and July 2026, while submission-to-completion accuracy improved by 30%, which the company attributes to AI-driven process enhancements. Average time from enquiry to funded completion stands at 26 days, and the team has recorded £960,000 in client savings year to date, with debt-consolidation borrowers saving an average of £549 per month.

Brokerage consolidation as a fintech play

The Believe Loans milestone is a lens into the broader private-equity-backed brokerage roll-up model Pivotal has pursued since 2021. More than 25 firms have joined the group, spanning residential advice, buy-to-let, bridging finance, development lending and insurance. Combined annual lending across the group is trending above £15 billion, the company says, with over 500 specialist advisers operating across 25 teams.

Pivotal's model borrows from a playbook gaining traction across financial services: acquire proven distribution businesses, layer in technology infrastructure to raise conversion rates and reduce processing friction, and use scale to negotiate better lender access. The AI-powered CRM Believe brought from its Click Tech merger is now embedded across its adviser base, connecting client journeys to lender and introducer partner workflows. The company works with over 2,000 introducers and serves more than 100,000 clients directly.

Mayank Prakash CBE, Pivotal's Group CEO, pointed to the combination of client focus and technology as the engine: "Accelerated organic growth underpinned by client obsession and next-gen tech is exactly what Pivotal does."

Capital consolidation and the lending market backdrop

The second-charge mortgage market, where homeowners borrow against existing equity without remortgaging, has expanded steadily as rising interest rates have made full remortgages costly. Demand for faster decisions and more flexible underwriting criteria is driving borrowers toward specialist brokers rather than high-street lenders, a dynamic that creates structural tailwinds for businesses like Pivotal's Believe division.

From a capital allocation perspective, the roll-up model Pivotal represents reflects a recurring pattern in UK financial services: private equity identifying fragmented, advice-led markets where technology-enabled consolidation can improve both unit economics and client outcomes. Pollen Street Capital, one of Pivotal's backers, is an established investor in financial services businesses, and the LSL Property Services partnership gives Pivotal a distribution anchor in the residential property market.

The convergence angle here is subtle but consequential. As AI tooling lowers the cost of processing complex, non-standard mortgage applications, the competitive moat for specialist brokers narrows unless they are operating at sufficient scale to continuously invest in those tools. Pivotal's acquisition strategy is, in effect, a race to build that scale ahead of any technology commoditisation curve. For macro investors watching the intersection of proptech, credit markets and AI-enabled financial services, the question is whether roll-up operators can sustain above-market conversion economics once every mid-tier broker has access to comparable CRM automation. The 121% growth figure, however impressive, is partly a base-effect story: Believe joined the group less than a year ago, and the next twelve months will test whether those rates are structural or transitional.