Stuart Cheetham, CEO of MQube, has outlined his expectations for the mortgage market in 2026, pointing to AI-driven technology, lender resilience and operational efficiency as the industry’s defining themes.
Reflecting on 2025, Cheetham noted: “2025 has been an interesting year for the mortgage market despite decent growth in mortgage lending with gross mortgage advances soaring by 36.9% to £80.4bn in Q3 2025, the biggest quarterly jump in five years.”
He highlighted the early-year surge linked to the end of the first-time buyer Stamp Duty holiday and improved affordability, while acknowledging that “the squeeze on real incomes in the market as a whole, remains an ongoing challenge.”
He added that late-summer budget uncertainty had slowed demand.
Looking ahead, Cheetham said: “As we head into 2026, with the budget uncertainty out of the way, most fears allayed, and what we believe to be at least two interest rate cuts to come, we feel that the mortgage market in 2026 should outperform 2025’s numbers.”
He also said he expects service levels and operational capacity to come under greater scrutiny as volumes increase.
He added: “With a mortgage market that is set to further expand, the key issue for 2026, will be service and lender resilience […] Catering for this and maintaining service levels should be a given not a hope.”
Cheetham also highlighted the growing role of technology across the market: “2025, did see improved service levels across the industry as banks and non-bank lenders increasingly embraced AI and technological advancements in a way they haven’t before.”
He said this acceleration will continue but stressed that artificial intelligence (AI) will enhance, not replace, human input.
He added: “Technology will continue to increase its foothold in the industry in 2026 but whilst AI will play a crucial role in assisting human intelligence it will not replace humans and instead act as a human assisted function aimed at helping humans enhance productivity.”
Outlining MQube’s priorities, Cheetham said the firm will focus on making its tools easier to adopt, increasing education around AI and expanding internationally.
He said: “The first is making sure lenders, brokers and borrowers get the best out of our next generation AI driven mortgage making it quick, simple, straightforward and easier to adopt […] We need to plug the AI educational gap.”
He added that the business will also prioritise its tokenisation work: “Our evolving tokenisation architecture will provide lenders with greater liquidity by allowing them to make their mortgage debt tradable – this will have a fundamental change on our industry in the years to come.”
Cheetham concluded: “In terms of what’s on my wish list for 2026, it’s most certainly a more stable housing market so that more borrowers get the house of their dreams.
“As well as this, I would like to see everyday usage of AI across our industry as this is what will truly transform our industry for the better.”
