Pete Mugleston
Managing Director and Mortgage Advisor
About Pete
Pete is an award-winning, CeMAP-qualified mortgage advisor and Managing Director at Online Mortgage Advisor (OMA).
Highlights
- Over 15 years experience as a fully authorised and qualified Mortgage Expert.
- A Top 10 UK advisor, out of thousands for Lloyds Banking Group.
- Founded OMA, building a network of over 300 mortgage experts and helping over 600k customers.
- Founded (and sold) the award-winning brokerage Create Finance.
- Created the UK’s first direct-to-lender API for digital mortgage approvals.
- Created the LIBF-accredited OMA Broker Academy
- Led the creation of OMA’s industry-leading mortgage comparison tool.
- He is one of the go-to industry voices, writing for trade and national press.
- Supports charities Georgie’s Gift and the World Clarity Foundation.
- Is the champion for exceptional advice, developing OMAs in-house brokers to be the best in class for their channel.
Career history
After starting his career as a graduate at Experian, Pete entered the mortgage industry at arguably the worst possible time: the credit crunch of 2008/2009. It was a time he describes as “fertile ground to cut his teeth”, with tight lending criteria and high unemployment making whole-of-market mortgage advice incredibly difficult. Despite this, Pete became the most successful mortgage advisor in the company (UK-wide) within nine months of becoming FCA-regulated. Within 12 months, he was managing the branch and entrusted with recruiting and training new staff, many of whom were decades his senior.
Pete later joined one of the most prominent branches at Lloyds Banking Group. He took it upon himself to step out and launch a campaign to refinance customers and staff across the Midlands, and within 12 months, he was one of the top 10 mortgage advisors in the UK. During this time, he founded an initiative that rolled out across the group to ensure borrowers got the best financial and protection advice and invited wealth managers to join his customer appointments. This resulted in an unprecedented uplift in protected customers and earned him some real kudos from his colleagues and many happy customers. The entire group later adopted the approach to maximise the quality of advice to as many customers as possible.
With a passion for helping the people who need it most and a desire to help more people at scale, Pete founded Online Mortgage Advisor (OMA) in 2013 with company marketing director David Bird. Built on the mission of matching people with a broker who can provide the right advice the first time, OMA has grown rapidly and has helped over 600,000 customers.
To further develop processes and help more Online Mortgage Advisor customers get the right advice, Pete co-founded Create Finance in 2015. He did this alongside his role at OMA. Within three years, Create Finance grew from a team of three to 50-plus, with an in-house training academy allowing new advisors and trainee apprentices to join the industry and helping experienced advisors understand specialist markets.
Pete designed and managed the implementation of Online Mortgage Advisor’s heralded Salesforce-automated broker platform, harnessing technology with an understanding of broker and customer needs that few others share. Pete also headed up the UK’s first API integration with a mortgage lender, allowing customers to opt in for pre-approval directly from a mortgage lender.
He has also created and published Online Mortgage Advisor’s LIBF-accredited development program, the OMA Academy, the UK’s only online specialist mortgage broker training platform at the time. The academy formed the backbone for recruiting and training specialist mortgage advisors. Brokers could only access Online Mortgage Advisor’s customers once they had earned the right to, having completed the demanding 25-module course and obtained the appropriate license. The OMA Academy not only offered brokers an insight they’d get nowhere else, but it opened the door to a career in specialist mortgages for many.
Driving the OMA Mission
Fast-forward to today. Pete continues to drive forward the mission of Online Mortgage Advisor, empowering borrowers with expert guidance, helpful tools, and in-depth content to help them make the best possible decisions. He recently oversaw the development of OMA’s industry-leading mortgage comparison tool. Unlike any other tool, it lets customers “be the broker” by personalising the results based on official lender eligibility criteria.
OMA is focused on ensuring every customer is matched with an expert mortgage advisor specific to their unique needs, whether buy-to-let, bad credit, self-employed income or any other specialist mortgage situation, so they get the right advice from the right expert every time.
Throughout his career, Pete has had a passion for writing (he wrote a six-month travel blog and documented his team’s successful charity climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro). He is the drive behind most of the words you read on the Online Mortgage Advisor website, marketing information, and training material. He has written articles for trade and national press and is seen as a mortgage expert across the industry.
He writes regularly for Mortgage Solutions and Mortgage Introducer and is the mortgage expert for LOVEMoney.
When Pete is not helping customers get the right advice about mortgages, he gives his time and support to a charity that is very dear to his heart, Georgie’s Gift. Georgie’s Gift Ltd was set up in memory of Georgie Hall, who was only 23 months old when she fell ill in February 2015. Days later, she passed away after being diagnosed with Meningitis and septicemia. Pete also supports the World Clarity Foundation, which aims to eradicate chronic psychological suffering globally by 2030. He arranges keynote speakers and experts in the three principles to speak to staff and their friends and family.
Qualifications
- CeMap (Merit)
- BSC (Hons) Degree (Nottingham Trent University)
