Pepper Money – navigating four years of change together

The client

Pepper Money is a UK specialist mortgage lender serving customers and brokers across residential and buy-to-let products.

Part of the global Pepper Group, with their head office in Sydney, Australia, Pepper Money is a multi-award-winning UK specialist lender with £3bn in assets under management and offices in Cardiff, London, and Manchester.

They operate exclusively through intermediaries, offering a range of residential and buy-to-let mortgages to customers who are often overlooked by high street lenders; the self-employed, those with complex income, and those with adverse credit histories. The business takes a human approach to underwriting, looking beyond credit scores to find solutions where mainstream lenders won’t.

Their website isn’t a marketing nice-to-have; it’s operational infrastructure. Brokers use sourcing systems that pull from lender sites in real time. This means things like uptime, accuracy, navigation and performance are absolute must-haves.

Where things stood in 2022

When Marcus came to us, Pepper Money’s WordPress site was hosted internally by a platform team whose core expertise wasn’t WordPress. Every deployment needed the whole digital team plus a platform engineer on standby. Migrations took up to an hour, and could fail at the 50-minute mark. Content had to be bundled into product release windows because the resource overhead of deploying anything made independent publishing impractical.

Alongside the infrastructure problem sat a roadmap that wasn’t moving. Static product tables, a navigation that needed rethinking for a regulated environment where broker and customer journeys must be clearly delineated, no search functionality, accessibility gaps. Marcus had a clear picture of what he wanted to build. The conditions to build it weren’t there.

The foundation work

Pepper Money came to us through recommendation and selected us after due diligence on several potential partners. Being Cardiff-based helped, knowing a partner was close by if face-to-face conversations were needed gave the early relationship a solid footing. Our partnership with WP Engine was also a significant factor; for a regulated financial services business, hosting reliability and security aren’t preferences, they’re solid requirements.

We managed the migration to WP Engine, maintaining the existing sign-off process in staging throughout. Deployment time dropped from up to an hour to ten minutes – an 83% reduction – and those ten minutes were reliable. Any single member of the digital and UX team could now carry out a deployment independently. Environments could be spun up on demand. Rollbacks were instant.

The full story of that migration is told in our dedicated case study. What matters here is what it made possible.

How the relationship has evolved

The part of the Pepper Money story most worth telling isn’t any single project. It’s that the shape of our partnership has changed substantially over time, and keeps changing, always moving towards wherever the most value can be found.

As Pepper Money’s team grew comfortable in the new environment and their internal development team built confidence with the platform, their support needs shifted. Less development work from us; more UX focus. That shift happened naturally, and we adapted to it. The engagement moved through several distinct phases, each one focused on whatever was creating the biggest constraint at that particular moment.

Search came first. The site had no search functionality when Marcus took it over. We implemented Algolia, which immediately improved usability, but the more valuable outcome was the insight data. Search queries revealed patterns in what users were actually looking for, surfaced content gaps, and informed CTA placement decisions. Following user research on the search tool, search page engagement increased by 36% and on-page events increased by 29%.

Navigation came next. The existing mega-nav had grown into something eating thousands of lines of code and degrading performance. Rebuilding it required careful attention; in a regulated context, the distinction between broker-facing and customer-facing content is a key compliance requirement. The rebuilt navigation was faster, cleaner, and properly delineated.

Product tables were perhaps the most commercially significant piece of work. Because Pepper Money sells exclusively through intermediaries, those tables aren’t a feature of the website; they’re the primary interface through which their entire distribution network evaluates and places products. Moving from static tables to a dynamic product finder, updatable rapidly via CSV and searchable in real time, meant brokers could find what they needed faster, and the Pepper Money team could respond to market changes without a developer in the loop.

Hotjar analysis ran alongside all of this, surfacing CTA opportunities and identifying where friction remained. UX insight informed the roadmap rather than reacting to it.

Each phase of work informed the next. Search data shaped content strategy. Navigation work improved product discoverability. The UX roadmap gave the Pepper Money team clarity on where to focus their own resources. That compounding effect is what an ongoing partnership delivers that a series of one-off projects simply can’t.

What the data shows

From 2024 to 2025, across the Pepper Money site:

• Average engagement time per user increased by 61%.
• Average engaged sessions per user increased by 35%.
• The number of returning users grew by 20%.

These aren’t the result of a single project. They’re the cumulative outcome of building the right foundation, then consistently improving what sits on top of it. Work that is still very much in progress.

In a regulated financial services environment, where broker trust and repeat engagement are commercially meaningful signals, they represent exactly what this kind of partnership is designed to deliver.

The relationship today

We continue to work with Pepper Money, and the model remains the same as it has always been: we focus our skills wherever they’re needed most. As their platform matures and their team’s capabilities develop, our role adapts accordingly. The questions we’re helping them answer today are different from the ones we started with in 2022, and that’s brilliant for everyone involved.

Could this be the start of a great new agency relationship?

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