Monzo closes Habito deal, its first acquisition, to put full mortgage broking inside its app

Monzo has completed its purchase of Habito, the UK digital mortgage broker, closing the first acquisition in the bank's eleven-year history. The deal was agreed in December 2025 and closed at the end of April 2026; neither side has disclosed the price.

For Monzo, the purchase fills a gap. It can now handle a mortgage from first search to agreed deal inside its own app, which it says no other UK bank currently does. For Habito's backers it is an exit for a broker that spent a decade trying to move mortgage advice online.

What Monzo gets

Habito was founded in 2016 and employs roughly 100 people. Its registered office is in Reading, Berkshire. The company compares mortgages from more than 95 lenders, assigns each client an adviser and a case manager, and charges nothing for advice. It is paid a commission by the lender when a customer takes out a loan. Its investors included Augmentum Fintech, SBI Investment and Volution.

Monzo already had a foothold in the area. Its Homeownership tool lets customers link an existing mortgage from any provider and see the outstanding balance, an estimate of the home's value and cheaper deals they might switch to. When the acquisition was announced, Monzo said more than 450,000 customers were using it. Habito adds the regulated advice and the broking process that the tool lacked.

The bank pointed to industry figures showing that 87% of people looking for a mortgage in the UK in 2024 went through a broker. That is the pool Monzo wants a share of. Kunal Malani, Monzo's chief banking officer, described mortgages as "a complex, cumbersome pain point, and one we are looking to solve."

A broker, not a lender

The deal does not turn Monzo into a mortgage lender. Habito has told its customers that it will keep comparing deals across the market, from big banks to building societies and specialist providers, and that it is not launching Monzo-branded mortgages.

People will not need a Monzo account to use Habito, and existing Habito clients keep their adviser, case manager, lender and rate. Fees and services are unchanged, the company said, though data may be shared within the Monzo group where needed to provide the service.

Ying Tan, Habito's chief executive, is staying on to run the business inside Monzo. On the Monzo side, the bank appointed Andrei Lebed as head of homeownership in December. Lebed founded the mortgage technology company Koodoo in 2019 and before that was product lead at Dynamo Mortgages between 2017 and 2019, a firm Tan had founded in 2006.

Why a first deal now

Monzo has grown mainly by building its own products, so a purchase is a change of approach. The timing follows strong results. Turnover reached £1.2bn in the bank's 2025 financial year, a 48% rise, and adjusted pre-tax profit of £113.9m, against £13.6m a year earlier. At the time of the announcement it had 14 million customers, including 800,000 businesses.

Because Habito earns lender commissions, broking gives Monzo income without lending its own money. The bank has also been looking at other sources of revenue, including a planned UK mobile phone service.

Founded in London in 2015, Monzo now says it has more than 16 million customers and over 2,000 staff. Its most recent disclosed funding was a $430m round in March 2024 led by CapitalG, which valued it at more than $5bn. The Habito deal closed in the same month that Monzo opened to customers in Ireland, its first EU market.

For other European fintechs, the deal shows a familiar route for specialist brokers: a sale to a large consumer app that already owns the customer relationship. The question for Monzo is how quickly it can move Habito's adviser-led service into its own app while keeping the dedicated advisers and case managers that Habito offers today.

The next step is the integration itself. Habito has said the two teams are combining their technology and that more ways to manage a mortgage from inside the Monzo app will follow, without giving a timetable.