Keeping first-time buyers after the first meeting

For most first-time buyers, the first meeting with a mortgage adviser is a crash course. How much can I borrow? What does a house really cost per month? How does bidding work? One of the three largest banks in the Netherlands gave starters exactly that course, and then watched many of them take out their mortgage somewhere else.

The challenge

The pattern was the same every time. A starter booked an orientation meeting at the bank, left with a lot of new knowledge and went house hunting. Weeks or months later, when they had found a house, they sat down with an adviser at a competitor. That second meeting was better: the buyer now knew what to ask, the conversation was about a real house, and the competitor got the mortgage.

The bank's advisers had no way of knowing what happened in between. Was the buyer still looking? Had they found a house? Were they about to make an offer? Without that information, follow-up came too late or at random. Compared with the competitor's concrete second meeting, the bank's first meeting felt less valuable, even though it had done the hard work. The bank was educating buyers and losing valuable leads.

Our approach

1. Understanding the drop-off

We started with research. Using a clickable prototype, we interviewed financial advisers about how they work with starters, what happens after the first meeting and where contact is lost. The problem was not the quality of the advice; it was that the relationship stopped the moment the buyer walked out of the door.

2. A reason to stay in touch

The answer was a free tool that buyers receive from their adviser after the orientation meeting, for the part of the journey they would otherwise do alone. For any house they are interested in, it shows an estimate of its value, recent sale prices in the neighbourhood, possible bidding strategies and what the monthly costs would be at each bid. It is clear about what it is: support for a decision, not an official valuation. The bank stays part of the search, not just its starting point.

3. Insight for advisers: who to call, and when

The real value sits on the bank side. Every buyer who uses the tool leaves signals about where they are in their journey: how active they are in the market and which houses they are looking at. We turned those signals into insights for advisers, so they can get back in touch at the moment it matters, with context. More often, the meeting that used to happen at the competitor now happens at the bank.

4. Building it inside a bank

From 2023 we built the product together with the bank's team: architecture and roadmap, a first working version end to end, and the integrations with the bank's customer systems and secure login. Access runs through the advisers, so the tool strengthens the advice relationship instead of competing with it.

5. Pilot, growth and hand-over

A pilot with real customers and advisers ran from late 2023 to mid 2024. Once live, we set up lifecycle and drip email campaigns and ran growth experiments against the assumptions behind the product. When the tool had 20,000 users, we handed it over to the bank's business unit.

The outcome

• 5–7% higher conversion: advisers contact the right buyers at the right moment, and more starters take out their mortgage with the bank.

• An estimated €10 million in extra revenue per year from that increase in conversion.

• 20,000 users at the moment of hand-over to the business unit.

• Part of the bank: in 2026 the tool has been fully absorbed as a standard service of the bank.

Key takeaways

• Look at what happens after the first meeting. That is often where the customer is lost.

• The most valuable part of a customer tool can be the insight it gives your own people.

• Give customers a reason to keep coming back during the part of the journey they would otherwise do alone.

• A venture is done when the organisation owns it. Being absorbed into the business is the goal, not the end.