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Hannah Baynham and her co-founder Rob spent a particularly cold winter afternoon doing something most tech founders would consider insane: standing on London high streets with clipboards, asking strangers about their debt.
The responses stopped them cold. Eighty-five percent of people said they worried about their ability to repay loans. The same percentage said their lenders weren't giving them the tools or support they needed. And perhaps most striking, person after person told them the stress was destroying their mental health.
"That was speaking to people on the high street that really gave us the energy we needed," Hannah recalls on the latest episode of Angel Insights. "This is definitely a problem that's definitely quite overlooked."
Four years after those high street surveys, Hannah's company Haboo Money is tackling what she calls the "repayment gap"—the massive disconnect between how easy it is to get into debt and how hard it is to get out of it.
Hannah's journey into this problem began at the heart of the UK's fintech boom. As an early employee at Starling Bank, she watched digital challengers transform banking from something boring into something people actually got excited about.
"People were excited to download Monzo and have their golden ticket," she remembers. "I just thought that was fascinating and actually just really good that digital was being used as a tool to drive financial inclusion."
But as Hannah moved into management consulting, working with legacy financial institutions on innovation, she noticed a glaring blind spot. Lenders had spent millions perfecting frictionless digital experiences for accessing credit—apply on your phone, get approved in minutes. But the experience of paying it back was frozen in time.
"The repayment experience is totally neglected," Hannah explains. "It's still the same as it was ten years ago or more."
The scale of the problem is staggering. The UK now carries £237 billion in unsecured consumer debt—roughly £4,400 for every adult.
Most lenders offer a single, rigid option: a direct debit that pulls the same amount on the same day every month. It’s a "one-size-fits-all" model that fails to account for the modern gig economy. The result is that 60% of people seeking debt help are employed. They aren't necessarily broke; they are disorganized, overwhelmed, and abandoned by systems that treat everyone like they get paid a flat salary on the first of the month.
"It's not entirely an affordability issue," Hannah notes. "A lot of customers don't have the organizational ability to manage those repayments, but also aren't given the tools to manage them effectively."
Haboo Money’s solution is deceptively simple: match repayments to how people actually get paid. Using open banking data, the platform understands a user’s real income patterns—whether they get paid weekly, every other Tuesday, or on a fluctuating gig basis—and builds a repayment plan around that reality.
Partnering with Griffin Bank, Haboo created an embedded "save as you repay" wallet. For a gig worker, this means that in a high-income month, Haboo can automatically set aside a surplus. When they have a lean month, that cushion covers their minimum payment, preventing a spiral into default.
For the sophisticated investor, Haboo’s defensibility lies in its dual-sided value proposition as a B2B2C infrastructure play:
The regulatory tailwind: The FCA’s Consumer Duty regulations now force lenders to prove they are delivering "good customer outcomes." Haboo provides the tangible tools and data lenders need to meet these non-optional standards.
The data play: The platform captures "vulnerability flags" through engagement patterns. It can spot a lost job or reduced shifts through app engagement before a payment is missed. "Those are things that typically lenders wouldn't know about until after a missed payment event," says Hannah.
Aligned incentives: Haboo operates on a performance-based commission model. They only make money when borrowers successfully repay, making them a lower-risk partner for lenders compared to traditional fixed-fee processors.
Haboo is currently focused on personal loans, but the roadmap is vast. From the £1.6 trillion mortgage market to auto finance and student loans, the opportunity to bridge the repayment gap exists wherever debt is held.
Hannah’s five-year mission is ambitious: help one million people move out of debt and into active savings. "Success is not just getting people out of debt, but helping them build the financial resilience they need to get through life."
Sometimes, fixing a multi-billion pound systemic flaw starts with putting on a winter coat and asking people on the high street what’s actually wrong.
To learn more about Hannah's journey and the future of Haboo Money, listen to the full episode on the Angel Insights podcast.
Haboo Money is part of the SyndicateRoom Access EIS Fund portfolio. Investment in early-stage startups involves significant risks, including loss of capital and illiquidity. These investments are only suitable for sophisticated and high-net-worth investors.
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