Thrilled to welcome Pretto!
Cocorico! We are delighted to announce our investment in Pretto, a fully digital mortgage broker, created by Pierre Chapon and Renaud Pestre in 2017.
In this Series A round that we co-led with Alven, Pretto raised €8M. This amount comes on top of the €1.3M raised one year ago from French business angels like Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Olivier Mathiot (co-founders of Priceminister), Hugues Le Bret (co-founder of Compte Nickel, now part of BNP Paribas) and Christophe Crémer (founder of Meilleurtaux).
Why are we investing in Pretto?
We believe Pretto is a real game-changer in the French mortgage brokerage market, in (at least) two ways: with its innovative business model and its flawless user experience.
In France, approximately one-third of home-buyers use a broker to negotiate their mortgage. They can do so by coming through the doors of a traditional brick-and-mortar player or by filling a form on an online platform. Some key players of the market have both an online and offline presence.
In this market, every online broker relies on a lead-generation model: to get a quote, the potential new client has to fill a form and give away some (valuable) personal information. A few hours or days later, their case is handled by a call-centre or dispatched to a local agency. Then, those brokers charge their clients some fees (from one to a few thousand euros) while also getting paid by the banks (about 1% of the amount borrowed).
Pretto adopted a different model. The whole process happens online, which means from your sofa, no need for a physical meeting! The team behind Pretto worked hard to create a first-in-class seamless online process, fully automated, but with a human touch, when needed. No more paperwork, everything is digitised and transparent. At the end of the day, the process is much more efficient for the user.
The service is also totally free for the user. And, the cherry on the cake, anyone can get a quote without giving its personal data. Clients are not anymore fooled by a shiny, out-of-reach rate, they get a real offer in a few minutes, which saves a lot of frustrations.
All those efforts are being rewarded by a very high level of customer satisfaction. That’s another proof that today, especially among the young generation (the so-called « Millennials »), people don’t value the physical contact as much as in the past, as long as their needs are answered in a simple and efficient way.
Pretto is also the demonstration that trust can be built online through well-designed user experience and technical excellence. Those assets will make the company a leader in the French market. That’s our conviction.
