Why we build bricks, not a product
A short defence of the brick model - small focused tools that combine - versus the all-in-one platform every other broker-tech vendor sells.
Every other broker-tech vendor we have looked at has the same shape: the all-in-one platform. CRM, sourcing, criteria, factfind, document storage, compliance - all in one product, sold for a fixed price per seat per month, all-or-nothing.
That model is comfortable for vendors. It is not always comfortable for brokers.
What "all-in-one" actually buys you
An all-in-one platform sounds efficient. In practice you get the vendor's best tool, plus several mediocre ones, plus a few that you do not use. You pay full price for the bundle. If the vendor is great at sourcing but weaker at CRM, you cannot keep the sourcing and replace the CRM. The lock-in is the product.
For some firms this is fine. For others - especially mid-size firms with a deliberate stack - it is a tax.
What bricks change
Each brick is licensed separately. Take Criteria; leave Sourcing if your existing sourcing tool works. Add Affordability when it ships. Drop Calculators if your firm's compliance team prefers the calculators in your CRM.
That model is harder for us as a vendor (we have to make every brick best-in-class on its own merits, not lean on a bundle), but it puts the firm in charge of their own stack.
The platform tax
The cost of the brick model is that you need a platform underneath that makes the bricks feel like one tool - single sign-on, consistent UI, shared user / firm data. That platform is what we built first, before any individual brick. It is the unglamorous bit and you cannot really see it from the outside.
If we have done it right, you will not notice the platform at all. Each brick will feel like a single coherent tool. The fact that it is a brick rather than a feature inside a bigger product is what makes the firm's stack flexible.
Two products, ten bricks
We launch with Lending Criteria, Protection Criteria, Calculators and CRM, and more bricks follow. CRM and Club are the two larger products that bind the bricks into a full broker environment for firms that want one-environment-end-to-end.
Both products are themselves licensed à la carte alongside the bricks. You can run a brick stack alongside CRM, or use the bricks alongside your existing CRM. Either works.
This is the bet
That specialism plus a good platform layer beats one big monolith. We will see if the market agrees.
