The Story of Oper: From a Pub in Birmingham to Europe’s Mortgage Tech Platform

The Story of Oper: From a Pub in Birmingham to Europe’s Mortgage Tech Platform

The decision that would redefine Oper’s future happened in a pub in Birmingham, UK. The team had set out to build software for trading power through renewable energy assets. Facing dwindling resources, they pivoted their entire business model.

But this story doesn’t start in that Birmingham pub. It starts with a backpack.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Geert Van Kerckhoven, CEO and Co-Founder of Oper, a mortgage tech platform that’s raised over $15 million, explained how nearly two decades at the intersection of banking and technology prepared him for a moment of frustration that would spark a company.

The Backpack of Experience

“I see it a bit as, you know, I was walking around this industry with my little backpack,” Geert explains. Inside that backpack: expertise in building mortgage lending technology, exposure to how large lenders struggled with in-house development, and knowledge of post-financial-crisis regulatory changes across Europe.

But technical expertise alone doesn’t spark companies. Frustration does.

“I did my second mortgage around that period and I couldn’t understand how slow, untransparent the journey was,” Geert recalls. “So I also had a very bad b two c experience.”

Here was someone who had built “maybe eight or nine similar systems” for banks, yet experiencing a mortgage process trapped in the past.

At management consulting, Geert met his co-founder. Together, they saw something others missed: “There is no reason for this to be such a bad journey. Theres nothing preventing us from building a much better experience.”

The Whiteboard Vision

The founding moment centered on a thought experiment. “We went to a whiteboard, we wrote down, how would a five star, I mean if today a mortgage experience is basically like a horrible hotel where like the bugs are crawling out of the bed, how would a Ritz Carlton experience look like?” Geert explains.

The vision: “We really take on the origination journey. We basically bring it to the, let’s say, 21st or even 22nd century by reducing paper and by using technology intelligently to reduce borrower anxiety and just make this whole experience a lot more pleasant for everybody involved.”

The Three-Month Customer

Armed with their roadmap and a prototype, Geert pitched to his network. Within three months, a prospect said: “Look, if this is what you guys are going to build, I’ll happily be your first client. And I want to act as a design partner.”

They incorporated to send their first invoice. “Basically were hitting revenue as of day one,” Geert notes.

“A lot of people say you’ve been so lucky,” Geert acknowledges. But his track record of building similar systems closed the deal.

The real test: proving they could find a second client “to avoid we would build something proprietary for that first client.” They succeeded. That first design partner? “Still one of our client today and still super happy of using opera and like taking in all our new features.”

The Pan-European Bet

Oper attempted something audacious: building a single codebase that could serve multiple European markets, each with different regulatory frameworks, languages, and banking practices.

The milestone that mattered most wasn’t revenue—it was reaching six European markets live. “That was for us, like all, let’s say, mid sized to larger financial institutions. That’s something we’ve celebrated really strongly,” Geert says. “For us, it really meant that this pan european software, which has been really hard to do, got validated.”

The Content Realization

Two years ago, new sales hires delivered unexpected feedback. “They told us, look, when we seed, let’s say, the founding team and the product team going to clients, it’s an experience we’ve never seen. You guys really know what you’re talking about,” Geert recalls.

The challenge? “That magic only happens when you have us in a meeting room.”

The solution: “We write a lot of reports, we write a lot of content, we go to a lot of conferences, we engage, we bring together our clients and our prospects. So we build communities.”

Geert treats content as his “weekend job,” writing with passion about digitizing mortgage processes. The approach generates “crazy download numbers” because it shares genuine expertise.

The Airport Vision

Ask Geert about Oper’s future, and he paints a remarkably concrete picture.

“What I always say to my teams is that I don’t know if it’s similar in the US, I can’t really recall. But in Europe, if you step out of an airport, if you walk through the gate, you see always adverts of banks,” Geert explains. “And what I always say is, like every airport in Europe, I want to arrive, I want to see an ad from a bank, and I want to know they’re using oper today.”

It’s already happening in Basel and Zurich. Soon Vienna will join them. But the vision extends to Madrid, Reykjavik, London—every major European city.

“Everywhere we arrive, I want to see a logo of a bank and know that it’s using our software. Why? Not? For my ego. Not because I like airports or not because I like flying. Because. But then I’ll know we’re truly making impact across Europe with our technology.”

True to form, Geert actually does this. “I do this and I send it to my reps. Like, have we talked to them? How is the conversation with them going?”

The story of Oper isn’t about a single pivot or breakthrough. It’s about recognizing that two decades of experience prepared them to see an opportunity others missed. It’s about refusing to accept that mortgage lending had to remain slow and opaque. And it’s about building relationships that compound over time.

From that pub in Birmingham to airports across Europe, Oper’s journey proves that sometimes the best way to build the future is to make it feel like it should have arrived years ago.