Now in Labs: See your mortgage in Monzo 🏠

[HB (Harry)]

Hi everyone, I’m Harry and I work in the Borrowing team at Monzo and I’m here to give you an exciting Community exclusive:

We’ve just launched a new feature to allow you to see your mortgage in the Monzo app - now available in Labs for you to try!

Sounds interesting, tell me more:
There are over 90 mortgage lenders in the UK and this means that accessing even basic information about your mortgage isn’t always as easy as it should be.

It can be hard to take a more proactive approach to managing your mortgage if it’s not where you manage the rest of your money.

You may need to remember the log-in details for a lender that you don’t use for anything else or even have to phone them up! So it can be tempting to just wait for your annual mortgage statement.

When paying off a mortgage can take as long as 40 years, and with 2 year fixed deals common, you could end up with 20 different mortgages over its lifetime and have to get to grips with all these different systems - we want to change that. Our mission is to make money work for everyone; we think giving folks visibility of the biggest financial commitment that they might ever make is a really important step towards that.

After you opt in, we fetch your mortgage details from your TransUnion credit file and show them in a new card in the app.

You’ll then see details of your mortgage(s) in the Monzo app, your balance, payment amount etc updated everyday.

Always check with your mortgage provider/lender for the most up to date figure if you need to make any decisions.

Why now?
As many of you will be aware, the cost of mortgages in the UK has soared in the last few months. Bringing visibility into the Monzo app is more important than ever.

While everyone’s preferences will differ, we believe that the days of “setting and forgetting your mortgage” are over for the foreseeable future. As with all things at Monzo, we want to make it easier for you to get to grips with your finances. For many people, your mortgage is your largest single outgoing and the biggest investment you’ll ever make.

We ran a hackathon at Monzo in August and this was one of the 30 or so ideas that was explored over 3 days. We were one of the winning groups!

How do I access it?
We’ve been talking to a small group of customers (like we always do) to better understand the most important information we should be showing and how to make the experience great.

We’re now happy to roll this out for wider customer testing This is not the finished article, and as usual we’re getting new things to you before they are fully ready so we can improve them based on your feedback.

Here’s how to see your mortgage(s) in the Monzo app:

1. If you haven’t already, visit Monzo Labs in the app - giving you access to our newest upgrades and coolest prototype features so you can give us feedback and help us build the bank you want.
2. Go to the Account screen, then tap your name. Scroll down to ‘Monzo Labs’ and toggle the ‘mortgage visibility’ feature on.
3. Switch on the “See your mortgage in Monzo” in Monzo Labs
4. Access “See mortgage in Monzo” on the Home tab in the “Do more with Monzo” section
5. Follow the steps on-screen to get started! We don’t need any further information from you, you’ll just need to review a few pages and give permission so we can fetch your data.

Feedback is a gift - let us know how this new feature works for you
We’ve made it easy for you to tell us what you think in the app, please spare a few minutes to let us know what you like, what you don’t and any suggestions you may have.

If something isn’t working, then you can report it in the feedback section under the “Share feedback” section.

What’s next?
We’re hoping to make this available to all customers in the near future but we need your feedback to ensure that release is the best it can be!

If all goes to plan, this is just the start. Based on our research with customers, we’ve got some great ideas on what to work on in 2023, but we’d love to hear what you’d like to see next to help you stay in control of your home finances!

[ndrw (Monzo is better than sliced bread)]

This is great and I love how easy it sounds to set up! I can’t see it in Labs yet, I will check for an update.

@HB

After you opt in, we fetch your mortgage details from your TransUnion credit file and show them in a new card in the app.

You’ll then see details of your mortgage(s) in the Monzo app, your balance, payment amount etc updated everyday.

Is the TransUnion report updated frequently enough for this to be a daily thing? I would’ve thought that like every other product, this would be reported once a month.

[Revels]

This is great, monumentally depressing, but great.

Really nice how it connects too, I don’t have any login details (I don’t think) so was half expecting a battle to have to find it.

[BristolMatt (Matt C)]

@ndrw

Is the TransUnion report updated frequently enough for this to be a daily thing?

I thought the same. Wondering why this can’t be achieved via Open Banking? It’s a bit frustrating that the figure in Monzo does not match the figure in the Nationwide app (which I then wouldn’t need to log into).

[robsug]

This worked so well for me.
No login details, found my Barclays mortgage easily and automatically.
Even shows a branded “card” to represent.
Scary to see I’m only 6% through my mortgage

Would love to see options to pay extra etc in the future.

[ndrw (Monzo is better than sliced bread)]

@BristolMatt

Wondering why this can’t be achieved via Open Banking?

Because (most, if not all) mortgages aren’t open banking compatible (and banks don’t have to make them so).

[BristolMatt (Matt C)]

That’s annoying!

[DaveJ (Dave)]

I sent some feedback in app.

Would be nice to override the amount it’s reporting I pay back I overpay every month, but the credit files just have the agreed payment from when the mortgage was set up and not the overpaid figure. Granted that might need me to then possibly input and interest rate etc and maybe make it more complicated

[ndrw (Monzo is better than sliced bread)]

Very annoying indeed. Even savings accounts aren’t mandated which is just frustrating. The requirements need to keep up with the times

[DaveJ (Dave)]

14 ish more years to go though

[ndrw (Monzo is better than sliced bread)]

Set it up now and can confirm, this works excellently.

No, it hasn’t made me more depressed at all.

Also, the “last update received at x” is helpful – but confirms it’s not daily.

[DaveJ (Dave)]

Just noticed the years left does factor in my regular overpayments rather than based on the £370, thats from rough maths in my head. I’ll have to check it out properly later.

[Peter_G]

OMG ALL THE XMASES COME TOGETHER.

Ahem. Let me gather myself!

[HB (Harry)]

Good spot! Generally speaking, lenders are updating this once a month when they report to the various credit bureaux.

As other folks have mentioned, there isn’t the opportunity to get this information from a real-time source like Open Banking (there’s talk of it featuring in “Open Finance” sometime in the future, but that’s a way off!). We felt that a daily update by Monzo meant we’d pick up any update as soon as possible

[HB (Harry)]

This is certainly something we’ve spent some time thinking about - and is a little complicated by the amount of data we receive.

Generally speaking, we’re aiming to get value to customers immediately when they connect - but we’re exploring ways to help the folks who want to customise the view further!

[Paulw (Paul)]

This is amazing. It’s great to have the visibility in the app. I often find myself wondering about the mortgage balance and can’t be arsed to go to the filing box to dig out the latest statement. Great work Monzo! Another brilliant feature that makes Monzo sticky for customers imo

[Peter_G]

This is great!

A couple of things that immediately come to mind:

• My mortgage provider doesn’t have a custom card / logo. It’d be great to be able to upload my own one (or to have a way to have a wider default selection).
• In the text under the big balance, there aren’t any capital letters (so it reads something like “last monzo bank update 72 days ago”)
• I was a bit confused by the number above x% paid back. I know it’s the amount repaid (now) but it took me a while
• It’d be lovely to have a month and year as well as x years and y months for when you’ll pay back!

Now for the wish list!

• It’d be good to have a feed so you can see the balance changing over time
• If you’re paying your mortgage from Monzo it’d be great to have a way to link the payment out and the mortgage card so it updates automagically (and much more quickly!)
• It’d be lovely to suck in the current property value from the Zoopla (or similar) API so we can see a (sort of) net worth figure.

But this is an excellent job. Loving this addition.

Most importantly, though, welcome @HB! (I see you’ve learnt from @jackcully - having no photo is wise!)

[Peter_G]

@HB

Based on our research with customers, we’ve got some great ideas on what to work on in 2023, but we’d love to hear what you’d like to see next to help you stay in control of your home finances!

Ooh, I didn’t answer this!

If we’re talking financial visibility, my pitch would be to add manual accounts.

Using the credit report is a great hack for mortgages (and could potentially work the same for loans) but for savings accounts (and others that we can’t connect to Monzo) being able to have balances manually in Monzo would be super cool.

In fact, you might be able to do some other cool stuff too, like automagically updating “manual” savings accounts balances when you send money from your Monzo account…

[michaelw90 (Michael)]

Is the “You’ll pay off in” thing calculated just by remaining balance divided by my monthly payment?

I over pay every month, but the increased amount isn’t shown in the app. I should be able to change this (in theory) so that the left to pay figures update.

Also another provider - Coventry Building Society - with no branding.

Finally, also, it doesn’t update frequently enough. Can’t Monzo use my banking transactions which my mortgage is paid from to roughly update the total - not including interest maybe?