London

Habito: The Purely-Functional Mortgage Broker

Tell me about the work you are doing.

Habito is changing the way mortgages work in the United Kingdom. It's quite a complicated process to work through. About 70% of the market is intermediated, so it's a good place to build a consumer-friendly brand and fix problems like not being able to understand what an appropriate mortgage looks like or how repayments work -- in general giving free, high-quality advice that anyone can access. From a technological standpoint, we've built a product that does things like search the whole market for available mortgages really quickly, calculate borrowing amounts, etc., in a way that is transparent to the customer. Right now we have a team of about 40 engineers building and maintaining that software.

What's the technology stack?

We are mostly Haskell; we have a large Haskell back-end. The front-end is PureScript, which is a Haskell-like language that compiles to JavaScript. In other places there are lots of other things, especially in infrastructure and deployment.