Moneyhub and Brick Rewards (the trading name of Rently Solutions) have announced that the Brick Rewards app will embed Moneyhub’s open banking and data categorisation infrastructure to detect rent payments and identify eligible spending at partner businesses automatically.
The proposition is targeted at UK renters. Brick Rewards allows users to earn points by paying rent on time and spending at participating local businesses. Those points can be redeemed for gift cards, local perks including independent cafés and gyms, and rent credits. A premium tier automatically reports rent payments to credit bureau Experian, allowing renters to build a credit history without manual input.
The company says the platform currently operates in south-west London, with plans to expand across London before a nationwide rollout later this year.
What Brick Rewards Moneyhub open banking actually does
The core claim is automation. Moneyhub’s infrastructure is supposed to detect when rent has been paid and flag eligible spending without users needing to upload receipts or choose a specific payment card. Dan Scholey, chief product officer at Moneyhub, described the result as ‘an automated engine for financial growth’ that operates ‘entirely in the background with zero administrative friction’.
That is the claim. The evidence for whether it delivers that in practice at scale is not yet public. The SW London launch is described as having ‘already shown strong demand’, but no user numbers, retention figures or credit-score improvement data are provided in the announcement.
The credit-reporting feature deserves separate scrutiny. Automatically reporting rent payments to Experian can help renters whose payment history would otherwise go unrecorded by the major bureaus. Whether it meaningfully moves credit scores depends on individual circumstances and how lenders weight rental data, factors outside Brick Rewards’ control and not addressed in the announcement.
The regulatory backdrop and Josh Pavis’s founding argument
The announcement points to the Renters’ Rights Act as context, noting that the legislation continues to reshape the UK’s private rental market and has brought renewed attention to the financial position of tenants. The Act is not described as creating the product, but its passage does give the timing a certain logic: a period of heightened scrutiny of landlord-tenant relations is a reasonable moment to launch a product positioning itself on the renter’s side of that equation.
Josh Pavis, founder of Brick Rewards, framed the founding rationale in blunt terms: ‘When I first moved to London, I couldn’t believe that renters were spending 30, 40, sometimes even 50% of their income on rent every month and getting almost nothing back.’ The observation about rent as a proportion of income is widely acknowledged in housing research, though the announcement does not cite a specific source for those figures. Pavis’s point, that rent, unlike a mortgage payment, builds no asset and until recently built no credit history either, is the cleaner and more defensible claim underlying the product.
Rent as a percentage of take-home pay is the practical pain point the product is designed to address. The rewards and credit-reporting features are both attempts to extract some return from an outgoing that currently yields none for the tenant. Whether points redeemable for gift cards represent meaningful financial value relative to a 30-50% income commitment is a question renters will answer for themselves.
What is established is the partnership: Moneyhub’s open banking infrastructure is now embedded in the Brick Rewards app, the premium credit-reporting tier uses Experian, and the product is live in south-west London. The nationwide expansion Pavis mentions is a stated ambition for later this year, not a completed rollout.
