Meet Jack Steiner, Head Of End-To-End Managed Booking Experience: Checkatrade Express

Checkatrade is already a household name in the UK for finding tradespeople. What specific gap in the market or shift in consumer behavior sparked the creation of Checkatrade Express?

Checkatrade has played a major role in raising standards across the home improvement industry, building greater trust through stronger vetting, verified reviews and increased pricing transparency. This has helped millions of consumers feel more confident when finding and hiring tradespeople.

That said, a wider shift in consumer behaviour has created the opportunity to take the home maintenance experience one step further. As ‘click of a button’ services like Uber and Deliveroo have transformed consumer expectations, people increasingly expect instant pricing, seamless digital payments and the ability to book a specific timeslot, including evenings and weekends, in just a few clicks. Checkatrade Express is designed to bring that same simplicity and convenience to home maintenance, allowing consumers to book a tradesperson as easily as they would order a takeaway. With instant booking and clear upfront pricing, Express removes much of the hassle traditionally associated with finding and booking a professional. What may once have taken three days can now be arranged in three minutes.

The services currently offered through Express are designed to help customers tackle their ‘never-ending to do list’ with ease. Jobs range from oven cleaning and door hanging to garden clearance and wall painting. Customers simply describe the job they need doing and receive an instant upfront price before booking. They can combine multiple small tasks into one appointment, choose preferred time slots and pay securely through the Checkatrade platform. Checkatrade then matches the booking with a trusted local tradesperson ready to complete the work.

What does digitalisation look like for the home improvement sector? What role do AI and new technologies play?

Checkatrade Express is the latest innovation milestone in Checkatrade’s wider evolution beyond its origins as a simple trade directory. True digitalisation isn’t just about listing tradespeople online – it’s about creating a seamless end-to-end experience, from discovery and upfront pricing to real-time scheduling and secure digital payments. This reflects a growing consumer appetite for convenience, automation and technology that removes friction from everyday tasks.

As new technologies become more integrated into the sector, maintaining trust remains essential. Checkatrade will continue to verify trade identities, ensuring they pass up to 12 checks before joining the site, as well as continually verifying reviews to help ensure transparency and confidence for consumers. While AI and automation have an important role to play, technology works best when combined with strong data, established workflows and human oversight. The goal is to make the experience faster and simpler without losing the trust the platform is built on.

The adoption of technology through Express reflects a broader shift across Checkatrade’s ecosystem. Our product, TradeMore, helps tradespeople integrate AI-powered tools such as smart inboxes and automated quoting into their day to day operations, reducing admin and allowing them to focus on the hands-on work that makes them money.
 

How do you plan to modernise the trade industry in line with the likes of Uber and Deliveroo?

I’m fortunate to have experienced this evolution first-hand through my time at both Uber and Deliveroo. What made those businesses so successful was their ability to turn traditionally fragmented and time-consuming experiences into something simple, seamless and on-demand. At Uber, for example, I helped to facilitate the rollout of upfront pricing – a key movement which shifted the ‘instant industry’ away from estimate based pricing. And at Deliveroo, I set up Islandwide Delivery in Singapore, using generous rider incentives to double or even triple the restaurant selection customers would see in more remote areas. This opened up the variety of services consumers would access on demand, and was a key growth driver for the brand.

These developments – in both sector depth and price based innovation – now exist within home maintenance. At Checkatrade Express, I’m taking my prior experience to help the industry from a largely offline, manual process to a more connected and frictionless digital experience.

So, how will we achieve this? At the core of Express is the intelligent use of technology to improve speed and convenience for both customers and tradespeople. Express uses AI-powered systems to assess factors such as local availability, skills, travel distance and preferred appointment times to quickly match customers with the right service – and the right vetted tradesperson – for the job.

Pricing is another key area of innovation. Home maintenance is complex because no two homes or jobs are exactly alike, making standardised pricing difficult. By using technology to process large amounts of job and pricing data, Express can provide customers with transparent upfront pricing before work begins, helping remove uncertainty from the process. This approach also helps differentiate Checkatrade Express within the market. While platforms such as Airtasker and Taskrabbit focus primarily on connecting users with tradespeople, Express is focused on bringing transparent, upfront pricing to home services at scale – all underpinned by the reassurance that our exhaustive vetting process gives to consumers.

What makes Checkatrade the right business to drive this forward?

Checkatrade is the only business which is well placed to combine convenience with verified, trusted tradespeople. As a long time player in the home improvement space, the brand has built deep trade expertise and a strong nationwide network of tradespeople across a wide range of categories. We’ve also built a team with experience from some of the world’s leading marketplace businesses, putting us in a strong position to help modernise the home maintenance experience for both consumers and tradespeople alike. This combination is key to the next stage of innovation in the home improvement sector, which we’re pursuing through the launch of Express.