Designing around real lives: how Gen H is rethinking mortgage innovation

Innovation in the mortgage market is often framed as a technology problem: faster decisions, more automation, larger volume. But for Peter Dockar, Chief Commercial Officer at Gen H, the real challenge runs deeper: too many people who could sustainably own a home are still locked out by systems designed for a different era.

Gen H, a fintech lender founded five years ago and active in the intermediary market for around four, was built specifically to address those gaps. Dockar joined after running mortgage and lending businesses at large banks, including HSBC and Clydesdale, and says that contrast has shaped how the firm thinks about innovation.

“A lot of lending policy is still rooted in assumptions from 10 or 15 years ago,” he said. “But the housing market, the labour market and household finances have all changed materially since then.”

When regulation becomes a convenient excuse

Mortgages are heavily regulated for good reason. Home ownership is one of the most consequential financial commitments most people will ever make, and when it goes wrong the consequences can be severe. But Dockar argues regulation is too often treated as a brake on progress, rather than a framework within which innovation can happen.

“I think too often regulation is used as a limiting factor, and it doesn’t need to be,” he said.

He points to Consumer Duty as an example of regulation that reinforces this approach, sharpening the focus on outcomes rather than prescribing rigid product design.

Some of Gen H’s more high-profile propositions — including New Build Boost and its part-and-part interest-only products — don’t fit neatly into established regulatory categories. That has required detailed engagement with the FCA ahead of launch, but Dockar says the regulator has been “genuinely very supportive” where propositions are clearly designed around sustainable customer outcomes, rather than novelty for its own sake.

Crucially, he sees constraints — from regulation to funding models — as sharpening decision-making rather than restricting it. He compares the approach to Shostakovich writing his Fifth Symphony under political pressure: the boundaries refining, rather than stifling, the creative process.

Designing products for the missing middle

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Dockar frames the barriers to homeownership as a simple matrix: you need a deposit and you need to be able to afford the mortgage. Customers with both a strong salary and a healthy deposit are well served by the High Street. Those with strong incomes but limited deposits have seen useful innovation from Gen H and others, via family support products and 100% or long‑term fixed loans.

Where he sees the biggest structural gap is for households with modest deposits and good – but not “super‑high” – earnings. With average house prices outside London running at around six times income, a 100% LTV loan still doesn’t work if you’re on £30,000–£50,000 a year.

“So we said: how can we provide additional support there?” he explains.

New Build Boost is one answer. Gen H had already built a legal and tech framework to let friends and family contribute to a borrower’s deposit in a ring‑fenced, protected way. The natural next step was to ask: why not let housebuilders play that role?

Housebuilders, he points out, are strongly incentivised to create homeowners – they want to sell stock. Under New Build Boost, builders can effectively provide deposit support within Gen H’s framework, enabling customers on average household incomes of around £35,000 to buy homes worth roughly £250,000 – purchases that would typically be out of reach without that structure.

The part‑and‑part interest‑only model takes aim at another prevailing solution: shared ownership. Dockar is candid about his reservations.

“With shared ownership you’re fundamentally paying rent on most of your property and a mortgage on a bit – and rent goes up with inflation,” he says. Gen H’s alternative is to treat part of the borrowing as interest‑only – functionally similar to rent – but “you’re paying rent to yourself”, with the crucial difference that the interest cost is fixed and the customer owns 100% of the property from day one. Overpayments build equity without the complexity of staircasing or dealing with a housing association.

Behind the scenes, product design is just as focused on long‑term sustainability as on initial access. For example, New Build Boost includes an equity cap: borrowers will never repay more than double the original loan amount on that element. The cap is calibrated against long‑run inflation and typical mortgage terms, to avoid recreating the kind of open‑ended, unfunded exposure seen in Help to Buy.

Human judgment, tech-enabled

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Given Gen H’s target customers – self‑employed, multiple income sources, non‑standard profiles – it would be easy to assume the lender relies on radically different risk algorithms. Dockar’s answer is more nuanced.

The real innovation, he says, is not in abandoning traditional credit disciplines, but in how information is gathered and presented. Gen H’s platform pulls and analyses rich data – including bank statements – and uses AI to automate low‑value checks, like validating that payslips match stated income. But the final decision remains firmly human.

“Every single case we look at has a human set of eyes,” he says. Underwriters are encouraged to form “sound judgments with context” – something he believes pure algorithmic approaches struggle with, especially for borrowers who have had “bumps in the road”.

The tech is there to remove noise and admin so those underwriters have the time and clarity to understand complex situations: multiple income types, family support obligations, near‑retirement parents, or limited UK credit history for new arrivals.

Dockar contrasts this with very large lenders, where unit economics drive a need to make decisions at huge scale and speed. In that environment, spending a day unpicking a marginal but deserving case is harder to justify. Gen H’s model is built to make that kind of nuance commercially viable.

2026: from headwinds to hope

Looking ahead to 2026, Dockar is “cautiously positive”. He notes that in recent years borrowers have faced a pincer movement of cost‑of‑living pressures and rising rates, compounded by structural regulatory constraints such as the now‑relaxed LTI cap that applied equally to niche first‑time buyer lenders and the biggest High Street banks.

With policy headwinds easing, a strong likelihood of lower base rates and house prices having effectively fallen in real terms while plateauing in nominal terms, he sees conditions gradually improving for would‑be buyers – without the kind of outright price falls that would undermine existing owners’ confidence.

Gen H plans to keep pushing into underserved spaces: emigrants wanting to put down roots in the UK, first‑time buyers whose credit files reflect life shocks rather than long‑term irresponsibility, and renters whose payment histories show they can comfortably support mortgage‑level outgoings.

For brokers, Dockar believes the key is to recognise the aligned incentives in this part of the market. Innovative products can be more complex and require more effort to understand, but they also create genuinely incremental business.

“If I help someone who otherwise wouldn’t buy, that’s money I would otherwise not have got,” he says. Lenders, brokers, builders and customers all benefit when a new homeowner crosses the threshold – and, in his view, so does the wider economy.

In a market where many consumers have lost faith in their chances of owning a home, Dockar wants Gen H to play a different role.