Fintel buys Mortgage Brain outright for £38.4m

Fintel buys Mortgage Brain outright for £38.4m

23 October 2026: Fintel, the UK group that supplies research, compliance and software to financial advisers, has bought the rest of Mortgage Brain Holdings for total consideration of £38.4 million. It already held 5.8% of the mortgage technology provider, a stake it took in March 2024, and the deal puts mortgage sourcing, criteria, affordability, CRM and submissions software into Fintel's Software & Data division.

Not yet independently verified. Fintel's release does not say whether the deal has completed or needed approvals, and gives no revenue figure for Mortgage Brain; the plans for AI investment and the AE3 Media business reported elsewhere are not in Fintel's own statement. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

A stake that became a takeover

Fintel describes Mortgage Brain as one of the UK's leading mortgage technology providers, with a strong recurring revenue model and consistent growth. Mortgage brokers use its tools to search lenders' products, check criteria and affordability, manage clients and send applications. Fintel's own business spans wealth, mortgage and multi-disciplinary advice firms, and the group already owns the ratings firm Defaqto.

Matt Timmins, Fintel's chief executive, called Mortgage Brain "a high-quality software business with strong recurring revenues, attractive growth characteristics and a leading position in the UK intermediary market". He said the purchase also increases the scale of Fintel's proprietary data assets and that Mortgage Brain's work in AI and advice quality review creates openings across its software, services and enterprise markets.

The Plannr link

The release singles out one technical reason for the deal. Mortgage Brain already has a two-way integration with Plannr, the adviser operating platform in which Fintel holds a 49% strategic stake, so a firm that gives both mortgage and wealth advice can run its work across the two. Fintel says advice businesses increasingly want integrated alternatives to legacy technology providers and that it sees a growing pipeline of enterprise opportunities.

For firms that use Mortgage Brain today, the release promises no product change and no price change. The questions worth asking an account manager are the ones the release does not answer: whether data from Mortgage Brain will feed Fintel's wider data products, and on what terms.

Bilgrami returns to run the division

Zahid Bilgrami, Mortgage Brain's chief executive, takes over leadership of Fintel's Software & Data division. He previously led Defaqto inside the Fintel group, and said that returning "brings me back to the business I led for a decade". He described the combined mortgage, wealth, insurance and product data as "a data set that is unique in the UK market". Our mortgage and loans software category lists nine products.

Company profile on TrustList: Fintel

Company profile on TrustList: Mortgage Brain

Sources

• Fintel: Fintel Strengthens Software & Data Division with Full Acquisition of Mortgage Brain, 23 October 2026
• FinTech Global: Fintel buys Mortgage Brain to unify adviser tech stack, 23 October 2026