Broadening our Intermediary horizon
Grant Seaton, Head of Intermediary Lending, reflects on The Cumberland's Intermediary Lending journey so far and the future ahead.
The Cumberland for Intermediaries has come a long way since its formal launch in 2021. I’ve been with the society since 1997 in a variety of roles, but building out the vision and people involved in our intermediary brand has been a key career highlight so far.
The Cumberland knew it needed to harness the firepower and flexibility of the wider intermediary market to achieve its mortgage lending ambitions and further expand its ‘kinder banking’ ethos. We also knew this market was ‘people-first’ and relationship-driven, which is working well for us so far given our team of expert manual underwriters and the business development team.
Building the team out to its 22-strong position today has been one of the most satisfying parts of the intermediary strategy delivery, so far. We have two superb business development managers - Anne Hodgson, who worked so hard to onboard all the in-area brokers over the last 2 to 3 years and Andrew Gordon who manages our key London relationships. Kevin Aitken, Senior Sales Manager, is also an integral part of the intermediary leadership team.
Next steps on the broker journey
We’re a lender of many parts, but our specialities are residential mortgages, including large loans up to £5m, and a willingness to offer up to 6 x income. Holiday lets is also an area that we have been active in for nearly 20 years now and we have supported brokers placing business for all types of property in Scotland, England and Wales.
Our distribution strategy for residential lending is currently limited to our operating areas of Cumbria, Lancashire, Northumberland, and South West Scotland, whilst also servicing a small panel of London-based broker firms who we have built strong relationships with over the years. That said, we do have plans, in time, to expand beyond these areas. However, holiday let does allow us to lend nationally, giving greater flexibility to brokers.
From the beginning of the year, we were listed on sourcing systems Twenty7Tec and Mortgage Brain allowing us to reach a far wider audience and offer an easier broker journey.
However, for a 174 year old building society, with a largely manual mortgage lending process, we knew digitisation would help sharpen our competitive edge. This led to the implementation of key projects, including the introduction of our mortgage affordability calculator for intermediaries for standard residential cases.
The digital calculator on our website, designed specially for intermediaries and with their input, has already freed up capacity in the intermediary lending team allowing us to process more applications.Brokers can now find out if a case qualifies against affordability whenever they want, cutting out the wait for a Decision in Principle and slashing up to two days off processing times.
As valued customers, getting the right broker feedback was critical to the design process and we’ve had some to excellent reviews on its simplicity and the clear illustration of our 6 x income lending with plenty of four and five star reviews via the website already.
We’ve got more broker tools and efficiencies to announce shortly. But one of the things we’re looking forward to most is extending our award-winning Platinum Trusted Service standards - which we’re delighted to have won three years in a row - further into the broker market.
Great broker service means offering each broker a named relationship manager for each case with a mobile number to call when needed and the determination to keep our BDM to broker ratio low. We’re starting as we mean to go on.