Mortgages are dull. There are 90,000 mortgages on the market with only acronyms (LTV, SVR etc.), numbers and decimal points (interest rates) to tell them apart. Then Habito launched in 2016, and that changed. They were a digital-first mortgage company offering customers far greater transparency than the banks or the shifty salesman in the backrooms of estate agents were, and importantly, they wanted to build a recognisable ‘brand’ in this low-interest category. After gaining 50,000 customers in its first 18 months in business, Habito secured £18.5m of funding in 2017 to accelerate its growth. Shortly after, Abba Newbery joined Habito as CMO to provide the marketing needed to achieve its ambitious new VC-backed growth targets. I caught up with Abba at Habito’s offices in East London to talk about how they decide on creative, the mindset they appeal to, and how skateboarding partnerships emerged as a match made in heaven.

Hi Abba, for a complete newbie, what is Habito?

Habito is a FinTech, innovating in the world of mortgages. We’re not just a mortgage broker, though; we're also a mortgage lender. So we create mortgage products. We just released a new one called Habito One, which is the longest fixed-rate mortgage in the UK, so you'll only ever need to get one mortgage for life - the rate is set forever which gives people complete certainty over their monthly repayments; no more guessing where interest rates will go to in 5, 10 or 20 even 35 years’ time But we’re also what we call a home buying service. So with your mortgage, when you're buying a house, you need to have your legal and surveying work done. So we’ll also do all that for you online, so we would call ourselves a home buying service rather than just a mortgage broker.

You once said that it’s your responsibility “to make Habito the most famous mortgage broker in the country”. Why is fame so important as an objective?

There are no mortgage brands in the UK. So if you think about a mortgage brand or mortgage broker, you will probably either think of “Bob”, the guy who did your last mortgage for you or your mum and dad recommended him to you, or you think of one of the big banks. But of course, the big banks do more than just mortgages; they do current accounts and savings. There’s not one business that holds the mental availability for customers. So we want to be that brand where you think: “I need to get a mortgage, I’m going to go to Habito.” Therefore, given that it remains completely unproven that anyone can build a brand in the mortgage category, fame seemed to us the only strategy we could use.

What’s the business ambition for Habito?

Our purpose is to help people find home. We want to make it easy for people to finance, purchase and move into their home. Ultimately, we want market share; eventually, we’d want to play an integral part in half of housing transactions in the UK. That’s our BHAG [Big Hairy Audacious Goal] that looks decades into the future - if you’re going to use old fashioned corporate strategy. But really, it’s for Habito to become the go-to place when you want to buy a home.

So what are some of the rules and conventions around mortgage lending that you see Habito as breaking?

Hopefully, we’re disrupting all of them. Our campaign construct is Hell or Habito. And pretty universally, the way customers describe the old mortgage process is always hellish. So we’re trying to fix all of those things. It’s hellish because you’re terrified of getting ripped off. And because it’s the most amount of money that it’s going to leave your bank account in any given month. It’s hellish because it’s full of jargon. And you just don’t understand, and it feels like your head will explode. And people keep using funny words like SVR and, you know, loan-to-value, and most people have no idea what any of that stuff means. But they’re spending (or borrowing) hundreds of thousands of pounds on this thing and then just getting bamboozled by it. It’s super stressful. People have told us that they’ve stopped sleeping, stopped talking to their partner, stopped having sex in the process of getting a mortgage. So we want to take all of that away. Buying a house should be a wonderful thing, an exciting, monumental moment in your life, not something where you’re just glad it’s over.

What is Habito challenging?

We’re challenging the old way to get a mortgage, done by (typically) a guy in a suit and tie on an Excel spreadsheet. You usually have to go into their office, fill out ridiculously long forms, you probably don’t understand a lot of it, it takes ages, and then you have to sit and wait for two weeks to get approval. It just doesn’t seem like a process that is relevant to 2022. Why shouldn’t you be able to get a mortgage from your bed on the weekend or from your phone on the bus on the way back from work? Why should you have to fill out printed forms? Some banks even ask you to bring in documents to the branch? It’s crazy. So we’re challenging all of that. We’re very much, in tech-speak, a ‘first-principles’ business, and we’re constantly ripping things up and saying, we’re not going to start from there, we’re going to start from how it actually should be done.

Is there a particular demographic you’re going after? Is there a mindset? Who’s the target?

We’re a bit younger than your average. The most common age group to have a mortgage in the UK is between 35-44, and the average age of our customers is 37. We definitely target a frame of mind, which we would describe as being in control of the process. The experience of financial services can often feel quite patronising to customers. And that works for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone. We want everyone who comes through our process to feel empowered and know what is going on. We give customers all the information, and we also do everything jargon-free. Fairer Finance has accredited all our mortgage documents, including our terms and conditions. So we’ve gone through every word and had it tested to be comprehensible to an 11-year-old, which is the average reading age of an adult in the UK. The industry standard for mortgage documents is a reading age of 18. So you have really important mortgage documentation out there that is just inaccessible to loads of people. We think you should complete the process and feel like, “Hell yeah, I smashed this, and I feel good.”

So what role does the company’s mission play in inspiring communication ideas and other activations?

I guess it plays an important role, but the interesting thing for us in marketing is to be careful not just to play out our purpose. Because if you take ‘helping people find home’, right, that’s every single mortgage you’ve ever seen, right? It’s somebody happy in their home. I think Nationwide’s campaign now is a street full of happy homes, and Zoopla have got people, you know, moving into their first home; it’s the category norm. So we are conscious of holding our purpose as our North Star. But if we play it out, we know we’ve got it completely wrong. Does that make sense? It’s completely counterintuitive.

Yes, you’re right, everyone else is doing that, and it could get boring. So how do you make sure that your creative feels properly Habito and is interesting and exciting and a bit risky? How do you decide what’s in and what’s out?

All of our campaigns are rooted in a customer truth. So everything you see is a customer telling us how hellish and how bad buying a home was. It was so stressful, applications full of jargon, beaten and strangled by paperwork, right? They’re all true problems. So we will never expose a problem that we don’t know to be true. And then we just take it as far as we think we possibly can. Because it isn’t a little bit stressful, your head feels like it’s going to explode, right? And people lose houses. Or it takes too long, and you’ve been on hold for 20 minutes, and it’s all that sort of pent up frustration. So we know we’re playing to a recognised emotion. And because of that anger, frustration, and stress, we have a lot of creative licence. In one of our TV ads, a first-time buyer becomes so stressed by reading his mortgage application; he starts to sweat. And then his whole kitchen fills up with water, and then he gets eaten by piranhas. Because we know that if he doesn’t get eaten by piranhas, it’s not funny. So it has to get to ludicrous. If it doesn’t get to ludicrous, it’s just stressful. And people need to understand that we’re poking fun at how stressful it is.

Can you tell us about Piñata man and the weird and badly photoshopped family portraits you’ve got around the office? Is that the ‘ludicrous’ idea playing out here to some extent?

I guess we sort of play a semi-sophisticated, stupid balancing act. So Piñata man is the star of our TV ad for our buy to let mortgage range. So the idea there was that you were getting so beat up by the whole process it felt like you were a human Piñata. So I found some guy who’s a set designer who does custom Piñatas. And the portraits are an anathema. Our head of HR is completely bonkers. And we had a Habito ‘house’ staff party four years ago - to celebrate the company turning three years old. And for some reason, no one knows why, those ‘family’ pictures were created. And they’re horrible, right? They’re freakish. Everyone hates them. And so yeah, they’re still knocking around the office.

You did an eye-catching partnership with an 11-year-old skateboarder. Why was that a strategic choice?

We’re the sponsors of Skateboard GB - the governing body of skateboarding in the UK. So why did we get into skateboarding? Because it doesn’t make any sense, right? Mortgages and skateboarding. So it came from our central purpose of helping people find home and us trying to think about what that means. And for most people, it means more than the four walls and the roof above the head; it means the community you live in. So we started to explore ways of involving ourselves in the community, and it suddenly emerged that skateboarding was a very interesting thing for us. We’d begun with skateboard illustrator Jimbo Phillips doing our posters. So we thought it was interesting because it fitted our brand’s imprint, and it was truly a community sport. And then, of course, it went to the Olympics. So we also knew it would be on a growth trajectory unlike any other sport, so we decided to get involved. We helped put on the first-ever GB skate championships. If they hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have been able to qualify anyone for the Olympics because they needed to have a national competition for us to rank and get into the Olympics. And now we’ve just started doing skatepark regeneration. So we’re part of the big Nottingham project. They are redesigning Nottingham’s town centre, and they want to do it in a way like Bordeaux and Malmo have done, which is to make skateboarding part of the city’s centre. So we’re a part of that project. We’re also doing work on the Isle of Wight, and Bournebrook in Birmingham. And we’ve just helped regenerate Hackney Bumps in London. So we’re trying to help provide an infrastructure so that skateboarders have a safe, inclusive and protected space for their sport. And what we see, in particular, is young girls like Sky Brown and Roxana Howlett, who is eleven and our national champion, inspiring girls to get involved in skateboarding. So we’re tremendously excited about that because it fits our purpose, without our purpose being so boring and worthy. But what we are doing, we believe, really is for future good.

I had to remortgage recently, and for the first time, ethics around sustainability was one of the criteria for choosing who I wanted to lend with. Does the climate crisis feature in Habito’s depiction of hell? Is that something Habito is taking a stance on?

We are B Corp, which means that we put people and the planet at the same level as profit in our business decision making. And we really do. Becoming a B Corp was no mean feat. You really have to be able to demonstrate that in your business. So the planet being on fire is a passionate principle here at Habito. We have an Impact Committee, and nothing I do in marketing is created without consideration towards people and the planet; everything is run past them, even down to the ink we use on our branded T-shirts. We also have plans to launch a green mortgage product. 20% of carbon emissions in the UK come from our homes, largely because we live in Victorian housing stock with leaky roofs, bad boilers and leaky windows. So we want to fix that housing emission problem. An EPC ‘energy performance certificate’ tells you in rough terms how bad your home is at emitting carbon into the atmosphere. For most people, it costs about £6000 to get your house from a D rating EPC to a C rating. If we moved all the D EPC rated properties to a C rated property, we would reduce the total carbon emissions from housing from 20% to 14%. So a hugely significant change. What we’re going to try and do is help you fund that fix, as well as help you fix it. And yes, we’d do it in a value chain, where the money that you’re borrowing is not coming from someone who’s investing in bad things. Watch this space.

Great. Can you summarise how you see Habito as a challenger brand? I thought your point around a clear purpose but always needing to take that extra step was interesting.

Yeah, we are a challenger business. Right? That’s unquestionable. Taking on mortgages is not something for the faint-hearted. It’s the biggest, most regulated part of financial services, probably the last to be touched by digital innovation. So it’s, it’s a gnarly problem. And Dan, our founder was frustrated at the process when he was trying to buy his own home; the process of getting a mortgage was so hideous he felt compelled to fix it. So we come with a lot of the founder’s passion, and that spirit runs through the business today, and it certainly runs through our marketing. We need to confront the problems, be honest, be transparent, be angry, be all of those things that human beings are about their mortgage process. And some people say to me, oh, your ads must be targeted at young people. So I’m like, why? Well, because they’re good, or funny, interesting and challenging. No, we’re here for anybody who wants to own a home. And if we’re not being challenging, and we’re not being talked about, or confronting the norm, then we’re not going to grow as a business, and we’re not going to reach our ambition. So we kind of don’t have a choice. Because in our market, every other brand, i.e. the banks, they’re spending £30m, £40m, £50m on marketing a year, with 60-second set-piece TV ads of horses running down beaches. We can’t compete. So we’ve got to box clever.

What can you share in terms of results? How is the business today?

We’re a VC-backed business, so triple-digit growth is expected of us. And we’ve managed to sustain that over the last four years, which is pretty insane, given what happened to the housing market with Covid last year. We’ve done over £8bn in mortgages, helped more than 500,000 customers, and we’re continuing on that triple-digit growth path.

Great. That’s a wrap. Thank you, Abba.

Cool. Thanks for having me.

Jude Bliss is Research and Content Director at eatbigfish — a global strategic consultancy dedicated to challenger brands and the challenger mindset.