4 minute read
Christian Faes
The loan ranger
CHRISTIAN FAES IS MAKING MORTGAGES SIMPLER AND FASTER WITH LENDINVEST
by Reon Suddaby
Among the many new things Christian Faes (Class of 1995) discovered during his time at Bond University in the mid-1990s was email. Fast-forward a quarter century and far more sophisticated technology sits at the heart of LendInvest, the property finance platform Mr Faes co-founded at the height of the Global Financial Crisis and recently floated on the London Stock Exchange.
After graduating from Bond with a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) in 1998, Mr Faes worked as a lawyer in Australia and the United Kingdom, before returning to the Gold Coast and setting up a small mortgage lending business. But London was calling, and for Mr Faes that meant a return to the English capital in 2008 to form LendInvest alongside a co-founder he met through a mutual friend. The timing was far from ideal, with markets rocked by the impact of the Global Financial Crisis. Sharemarkets were crashing, people were losing their jobs, and the mortgage market was at the eye of the storm. “I had no real idea in terms of how I would do it, I didn’t really know that many people, I was very naïve,” Mr Faes says.
Describing LendInvest as a mortgage lender that views itself as an asset manager, Mr Faes says the company’s early days focused on niche areas of the property market, before slowly building a base of institutional investment. “We’ve got investors like JP Morgan, National Australia Bank, Citibank, HSBC, large institutions invest with us, we’ve got around 3 billion pounds of funds under management from those institutions. We’re a pretty mainstream mortgage lender now, we’re not very active in the home lending space, but investment mortgages – short-term mortgages, development finance, through to investment, 30-year buy-to-let mortgages they call them here.”
Technology is critical to the work of LendInvest, and is described by Mr Faes as the company’s key differentiator. “We’re trying to change the experience of getting a mortgage. In the UK the average mortgage takes three months, at most lenders it’s an entirely offline paper-heavy process. At LendInvest, when someone comes to us they can apply online, and we use all sorts of new technology like open banking to be able to assess the credit of the borrower. I think generally financial services is a very slow-moving beast. Our core competitors in the core products we’re in are legacy banks, and they’ve got legacy systems, they’re using coding language from the 80s, where we’re using the latest technologies, recruiting people from Facebook and Amazon, cuttingedge engineers, and creating something very different.”
He is thrilled to have taken LendInvest from start-up to being publicly-listed. “I guess you kind of see it as the pinnacle of success in some respects when you’re an entrepreneur, to list your own business. It’s taken a long time to get there, 13 years building the business. To see it listed now, I have a huge sense of personal pride in that.”
As for young entrepreneurs wanting to follow in his footsteps and take a company to public offering, Mr Faes’ advice is simple. “I’d say just do it. If I sat down and thought about how you’d get to here, you definitely wouldn’t say rationally that’s a sensible thing to go and do. You’ve just got to believe in yourself and if you’re willing to work hard enough, luck will come your way eventually.”
While technology is the centrepiece of LendInvest’s business model, the societal shifts that often accompany technological progress have only been accelerated by the Covid pandemic according to Mr Faes, who sees work-from-home becoming commonplace. “I think that’s going to cause huge changes across society. I look at things like cities, places like the Gold Coast – it’s a much smaller city than Sydney but offers a great lifestyle and a more affordable place to live. Historically, a big challenge is accessing talent, now I feel it’s almost a democratisation of that, through online and people making lifestyle choices and living where they want.”
The pace of change is such that he feels many of today’s university students will end up working in jobs and industries that currently don’t exist. But with that rapid change also comes risk. “For future generations there is the very real prospect of burning out. I think certainly for the younger generation now, I imagine that’s quite difficult, the pace of movement and the expectations that places on people. I think we’ll probably see a real renaissance – we’re already seeing it – of people focussing on mindfulness and exercising and lifestyle, which I think is really important. With social media and the other influences people have, there’s a lot of perceptions that things are an overnight success. It’s often not the reality. Hopefully people are more aware of the need for personal time.”
