Habito

Mortgages were the last bastion of financial services that couldn't be arranged fully online — a slow, paper-heavy, advice-led process wrapped in regulation, where one wrong step costs trust and compliance. Habito wanted to change that without losing the rigour the product demands. The twin challenge: a customer experience reassuring enough that people would trust a screen with the biggest financial decision of their lives, and a back-office platform efficient enough that mortgage experts could handle the growing volume without drowning in manual process.

I joined as UX Lead in February 2017 and took on expanded roles as VP Product and VP Design, building and leading a team of five product designers and sitting on the senior management team reporting to the CEO. The work spanned both sides of the business: the customer-facing journey — marketing site, onboarding, chatbot and fact-find, the interactive mortgage calculator, life-insurance integrations — and the Mortgage Expert Back Office, the internal platform the advisers used to do the regulated work. Every key feature was validated with real users in person, grounded in clinical-psychology research into the emotional journey of a mortgage, before it shipped.

When I joined, Habito had 18 employees and had delivered £60m of mortgages. When I left, it was 150+ people and had arranged over £2.5bn. Conversion from session to manual advice rose from 2.5% to 4%, with 2.7× growth in volume over twelve months. The back-office platform lifted operational efficiency by over 33%. The product went on to serve 300,000+ customers with a 5-star Trustpilot rating.

Habito is where I learned what it takes to build software for a regulated, high-trust, document-heavy industry — and why getting the unglamorous internal platform right matters as much as the shiny customer-facing one.

The customer journey got the attention, but the **back-office platform was where the business actually scaled**. The experts had to do careful, compliant, document-heavy work at growing volume, and the difference between a 2.5% and a 4% conversion — between drowning and scaling — was largely in tools nobody outside the company ever saw. That 33% efficiency gain came from understanding the operators' real workflow and building for it, not from a redesign that looked good in a deck.

That's the same instinct I now bring to construction and engineering firms: the senior-person, document-heavy, compliance-bound work is where the time and the money leak, and it's exactly the work that's been too far from technology — and too expensive — to fix until now.