Monese Credit Builder is the latest offering from fintechs looking to help customers improve their credit rating by paying into a “reverse loan”. The service costs 3 times more than its main rival, LOQBOX, so what do you get for your money?
How Monese Credit Builder works
Monese Credit Builder is a cross between a savings account and a loan, and is designed to help you improve your credit score. Like LOQBOX, it does this by reporting monthly payments – that get deposited in a “locked” savings account – to the credit reference agencies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, as regular repayments on a loan.
You choose the amount you can pay, between £30 - £100 per month. Monese multiplies this amount by 12 and locks that amount away for you in a “Credit Builder pot”, to be unlocked once you’ve made your last (12th) repayment.
As long as you make all your payments in full and on time (along with the monthly fee), by the end of the year you’ll have 12 months of “positive payment behaviour” recorded by the credit reference agencies, and between £360 and £1,200 saved up and ready to spend.
You can cancel your payments before the end of the 12 months and get back the money you’ve paid in (minus the monthly fee: see below) but Monese warns that you’re less likely to see an improvement in your credit score if you do this.
How much does it cost?
Unlike LOQBOX, which is free (as long as you keep your savings in a bank account with one of their partners; it costs £30 to transfer it to a different account) Monese costs £2.50 per month. You’ll need to pay that fee on top of your monthly payments into your Credit Builder pot.
Is it safe?
Monese is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, but it’s not a bank. The money you pay into your Credit Builder pot won’t be protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, but by a process called “safeguarding” whereby your funds are stored in a separate account that Monese can’t touch.
Benefits and features
Once you’ve made 4 or more repayments into your Credit Builder pot, you become eligible for an extra feature called Monese Boost, which involves financing eligible transactions from your Monese account, up to an available credit limit, and repaying them over 3, 6 or 12 months. Monese then reports these repayments to the credit reference agencies.
Monese Credit Builder also offers a “credit health check” service to help you identify any factors that may be affecting your credit score.
Who is behind Monese Credit Builder?
Credit Builder is a feature of Monese, a mobile app alternative to mainstream banks.
Pros and cons of Monese Credit Builder
Pros
As long as you make your monthly payments as agreed, Monese Credit Builder’s reports to the credit reference agencies should help to improve your credit score over time.
If you’re already a Monese customer, getting started is quick and easy.
Cons
Monese Credit Builder is a relatively new product, so as yet there’s no evidence that it will actually help you improve your credit score, although similar products have produced results.
A monthly fee of £2.50 adds up to £30 over the course of a year.
As with other ‘reverse loan’ products, any missed or late payments will be reported to the credit reference agencies, which could damage your credit score.
Who is eligible?
Designed to help those who struggle to access credit or have little or no credit history, Monese Credit Builder is available to all Monese UK registered account holders aged 18-75.
How to apply
If you already have a Monese account and you’re eligible for the Credit Builder, you’ll see the option under the Explore section in your Monese app. To open a Monese account, visit the website or download the app.
Monese customer reviews
Monese Credit Builder is a new product and so there are no customer reviews available yet. As a financial services provider, Monese has a Trustpilot rating of 4 out of 5 stars, based on over 2,000 customer reviews. The negative reviews are mostly from customers unhappy that their account has been closed or that their access has been blocked.
Alternatives to Monese Credit Builder
LOQBOX is a similar product that also helps you improve your credit score. There’s no monthly fee but there is a one-off fee of £30 if you want to move the money you’ve saved at the end of the year.
Pave uses Open Banking to connect to your existing bank account and reports your regular bill payments to the credit reference agencies to help build your credit history.
Zempler offers credit builder current accounts for customers with a poor credit score.
Bits is a virtual credit card which charges a monthly fee and reports the payments to the credit reference agencies, Credito does the same (although it only reports to one credit reference agency, TransUnion) and SteadyPay offers a similar service called SteadyPay StepUp.
Tide offers a similar product to Monese Credit Builder and LOQBOX, but for your business credit score rather than your personal one.
The strongest benefit of this particular product might be the way it integrates with Monese accounts, so existing Monese customers can start using Credit Builder easily in the app and take advantage of the Monese Boost feature once they’re 4 months into their repayments.
However, the monthly fee of £2.50 does make this product more than 3x more expensive than its competitor LOQBOX over the course of a year. As Monese Credit Builder is so new to the market, it remains to be seen whether it will provide its users with 3x the value. But if you already have a Monese account and you want to build a good credit score and some savings at the same time, this could be a decent option.
As ever with this type of product, a word of warning: only sign up to ‘repay’ an amount you’re confident you can find every month, a if you miss a payment or make it late you could end up damaging your credit score even further, which in turn will affect your ability to borrow at competitive interest rates, or at all, in the future.
Credit builder tools like this don’t offer a quick fix: it can take up to 90 days for the credit reference agencies to update their information on you.
Your overall credit score should gradually improve as you make your repayments each month: Monese say they’d usually expect to see an increase in your score after 4 successful repayments.
Of course, this won’t be the only thing the credit reference agencies take into account, so whether and how quickly your credit score actually improves depends on whether you pay all your other bills on time, apply for credit with caution (because having credit applications turned down can hurt your credit score), make sure you’re on the electoral roll and do all the other things necessary to improve and maintain your credit score.
Monese has a representative APR of 9.10% which relates to the subscription fee of £2.50 a month, not the credit builder loan you are repaying – the loan is completely interest free.
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Grace was a Finder writer specialising in credit and loans. She's been writing about personal finance for several years and enjoys helping consumers sort the facts from the fluff.
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