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AskHomey was my attempt to prove that the future of banking lay in journeys, not products. I believe the thesis was right, but the timing was not. Both lessons matter, as does what has changed since.There is a particular kind of education you only get from failure, and since failure is expensive, it seems wasteful not to share the lessons. So let me tell you about AskHomey, properly this time, because the short version I usually give at conferences leaves out the parts that matter most.The idea didn’t arrive in a strategy workshop. It arrived, as the durable ones tend to, from irritation. By 2019 I had spent over three decades working in banking technology and I had also, like many people, bought then moved houses. The contrast between those two experiences was absurd to me. Inside the industry we congratulated ourselves on digital transformation; outside it, the act of buying and running a home, the largest financial and most stressful undertaking of most people’s lives, remained a chaos of estate agents, solicitors, surveyors, brokers, removal firms, utility switches, insurance renewals, and tradespeople, stitched together by the customer themselves with phone calls and a folder of PDFs and hundreds of emails. The bank’s contribution to this was a mortgage and a leaflet.Then there was the arithmetic, which I have never been able to unsee. When a customer takes out a mortgage, the bank sees a product while the customer sees a home. Tot up everything a household spends across the life of that home: the move itself, the furnishing, the insurance year after year, the repairs and renovations, the extension, utility bills, the remortgage, eventually the sale and the next purchase. That part of your life is a journey worth half a million pounds or more. The mortgage margin that banks fight each other so ferociously to win is perhaps a couple thousand pounds of it. It felt like banks were competing for the crumbs and leaving the loaf on the table.AskHomey was built to own that loaf, a platform for the household: one place to hold the home’s documents and data, connect the services a home needed, and embed finance where it belonged. At the actual moments of need, rather than where financial institutions traditionally sold it. The vision was that banks would white-label or partner with it: a way to stay relevant in their customers’ lives during the long stretches between financial products, and to be present, with data and trust already in hand, when the next financial moment arrived.I believed banks would see it as the obvious next step. What I learned instead, in meeting after meeting, was how a bank actually evaluates an idea. The innovation teams loved us genuinely and energetically. The strategy people nodded along with the journey logic. And then, somewhere around the third meeting, the conversation would arrive at the question that decided everything: “Which product does this sell?” Not “What customer problem does this solve?” or “What relationship does this build?”, but which line of the existing P&L would claim the spend and book the return.A journey, by definition, crosses every product line and belongs to none of them, which meant that, institutionally speaking, it did not exist. Asking a product-organised bank to fund a journey is a bit like asking which song sells the radio.I want to be fair: the banks’ decisions were reasonable. Each individual decision was locally rational. The mortgage P&L owner had mortgage targets. The insurance line had insurance targets. Nobody had, and nobody has, a target for the customer’s lifetime value, let alone a business model around it. And so, partnership conversations that began with enthusiasm would gradually decompose into pilot proposals, which decomposed into workshops, which decomposed into silence. We were never rejected, exactly. We were absorbed, politely, into the institutions department of deferral.Meanwhile the other clocks were ticking, as they do for every start-up. Consumer

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