OUR MISSION
The housing crisis doesn't end when you get the keys.
Getting a home is hard. Keeping it is harder: the remortgage, the renewal, the repairs, the rising bills. I've spent my working life trying to fix that for ordinary households. This is why.
Tahir Farooqui, founder
00 · THE PROBLEM
Britain talks about getting people into homes. Far less about keeping them there.
Every year, more than a million British households reach the end of a fixed-rate mortgage and face a new rate they did not choose.
Most homes are insured for less than it would cost to rebuild them, and most owners have no idea.
A boiler fails, a pipe bursts, a job changes, and the household is on its own with a dozen providers, none of whom can see the whole picture.
This is the quiet half of the housing crisis. It doesn't make headlines. It happens one kitchen table at a time.
Getting the keys is the beginning of the story, not the end.
01 · LONDON
It began on a walk in Clapham.
Most days I walked the same streets, Battersea Power Station on the horizon, and kept returning to one question: why does a lender's understanding of a household stop on the day the mortgage completes?
Nothing else stops. Children grow up. Careers change. Savings build, or don't. Kitchens get replaced, lofts get converted, parents move in. The home and the family inside it keep changing for twenty-five years.
Yet the institutions that serve them still see the household at isolated moments: the application, the renewal, the claim. Each sees its own product. Nobody sees the home, and nobody sees the people who live in it.
02 · ONE IDEA, THREE ATTEMPTS
I didn't set out to build three things.
I kept coming back to the same observation from a different angle, and each time it became a little clearer.
- 2016
Canopy RentPassport
A portable financial identity for renters, built from the rent they already paid.
More than seven million renters, at Canopy - 2023
Smartlayer HomeScore
Modelled the cost of bringing Britain's homes to EPC C, exposing the limits of using a single energy rating to understand an entire property.
Roughly 30 million UK homes modelled - 2026
MIZAN HomeGraph
The financial infrastructure connecting lenders, insurers and other providers to a continuous, permissioned understanding of the home.
One home. One financial record. Multiple institutions.
The same structural problem appeared from three directions: renters without portable financial histories, homes reduced to static energy ratings, and financial institutions operating without a shared, current understanding of the asset. MIZAN turns that insight into infrastructure — enabling institutions to work from the same permissioned financial picture of the home.
RECOGNITION
Recognised for advancing home finance.
A decade of work using data to improve consumers' access to better financial products and services for their homes.
From rental payment data to open banking and smart property data, this work has received recognition from the UK Government, Nesta and the financial services industry.
GOVERNMENT
Recognised by the UK Government.
- HM TreasuryRent Recognition Award · £100k prize · 2018 · Canopy
OPEN BANKING & SMART DATA
Using data to improve financial access.
- UK GovernmentSmart Data Challenge · Winner · 2024 · Smartlayer
- NestaOpen Up 2020 Challenge · Top 15 Open Banking fintechs · £50k prize · 2019 · Canopy
INDUSTRY
Recognised for innovation in financial services.
- Insurance TimesInsurance Start-up of the Year (B2B) · 2018 · Canopy
- FinTech GlobalInsurTech100 · 2019 · Canopy
- SiftedOne of nine rising UK fintech apps to watch · 2020 · Canopy
03 · THE HARD YEARS
It was not a straight line.
Building for housing is slow. Canopy reached millions of renters and was acquired. Smartlayer spent more than a year building with a major bank; the work was strong, and the programme ended before it reached customers. Both taught me how institutions buy, and how long it takes.
I also learned what makes a partnership with a large institution work: shared goals, clear accountability, and both sides committed to the households they serve. MIZAN is built that way.
Then life intervened. An accident, surgeries and a long recovery. And then I lost my own home.
I say this plainly, not for sympathy, but because of what it made clear. When a home is lost, the lender records an asset. The family loses its footing: the routine, the school run, the distance to work and to the people it relies on. None of that appears in any financial record.
A home is never just collateral. It holds a family.
I could have walked away from the problem I had spent ten years trying to solve. I chose not to. I am still here, and I am still building — not despite what happened, but because of it. I know now, from the inside, what it costs a family when the system only sees the loan.
Plenty of institutions promise to help Britain prosper. I've spent a decade trying to make it true, one household at a time.
04 · ONE PROBLEM, EVERY CITY
Different cities. The same blind spot.
I started in London, and London is where MIZAN starts. But wherever I've lived and worked, the pattern is the same: finance understands a household on the day it lends, then stops looking.
Where the question began, and where MIZAN starts.
Refinancing households, judged on a credit file that says little about the home.
Off-plan buyers whose lives change between reservation and the keys.
A nation of renters, and landlords running homes they rarely see.
Dense, well-run housing, still financed one product at a time.
Built for every market.
05 · WHY NOW
Every bank is building AI. The question is what it is for.
We carry the world's information in our pockets. We can see where a parcel is, what the weather will do tomorrow and how many steps we walked yesterday. Yet most families cannot tell you, at a glance, what their home costs to run, when their mortgage deal ends or whether their insurance would cover a rebuild.
For most of the last century, understanding a household properly was too expensive. It took people, time and judgement, so finance did the affordable thing: it assessed once, at the start, and hoped.
That is changing fast. Banks and insurers are giving their own staff AI agents — for onboarding, underwriting, claims and servicing. The institutions are getting smarter. The household is being left where it was: holding the paperwork, remembering the dates, joining the dots.
That is a missed opportunity, for families and for the economy. The same technology that lowers an insurer's costs could lower the cost of owning a home: spotting the fixed rate before it ends, the policy that no longer covers the rebuild, the leak before it becomes a claim. Used narrowly, AI will simply make the old system cheaper to run. Used well, it can make it work for the people who live in it.
Green mortgages show what is at stake. The products have multiplied, yet the FCA has found that some offer worse value than ordinary deals, even after the incentives. Too often the innovation is in the packaging — a discount, a cashback, an EPC threshold — rather than in understanding what a home actually needs, what the work will cost and whether it will pay off. An energy rating is one snapshot of a complicated asset.
MIZAN exists so that the AI arriving in finance works for the home and the household too — with a current, verified understanding of each home, families in control, and institutions responsible for every decision.
06 · WHAT IT WILL TAKE
No single company can fix this. The industry has to do it together.
Britain does not need another app. It needs a shared, current understanding of every home, owned by the household and trusted by the firms that serve it. Credit scores did this for borrowers a generation ago. Homes deserve the same.
That will take lenders, insurers, developers, technology firms and government working to one standard, with households in control of their own record. It will take partnerships in which risk and reward are shared. And it will take patience, because housing is slow and the stakes are high.
I am grateful to the UK Government's Smart Data Challenge, which in 2024 recognised our work on HomeScore and gave the idea of a democratised measure of the home a public stage. That support mattered. It showed that the public sector sees what the market has been slow to see.
The housing crisis will not be solved by any one bank, builder or minister. It will be solved when all of them can see the same home.
WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR
Lenders and insurers
Build with us on one shared standard for the home, and share the risk as well as the reward.
Developers
Hand over every new home with its record.
Government
Back a common, household-owned measure of the home, as it backed Open Banking.
Households
Own your home's record, and decide who sees it.
07 · HOW WE'LL EARN TRUST
Memory in the household's service, not surveillance of it.
With permission
Nothing is shared without the household's consent, and it can be withdrawn at any time.
Explainable
Every conclusion can be traced, questioned and checked.
Current
Kept up to date, not captured once and left to age.
Fair
The household is better off for being understood.
For two centuries, finance has understood the loan.The next century belongs to understanding the household.
I'm building again because the problem hasn't gone away, and now, for the first time, it can be solved. If you are in a position to help, I would like to talk.
Tahir Farooqui · Founder, MIZAN
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