Simon Lee

Lender outlines expansion plans

Bank set for next phase following recent surge

Leveraging tech will be central to Glenhawk’s drive for growth, according to the lender’s recently appointed head of mortgages, Simon Lee.

The London-based challenger bank last month announced four new hires to support its growth ambitions, adding that demand for alternative lending had increased since the COVID pandemic.

Aside from Lee, the new appointments include commercial director Michael Clifford, head of marketing Sarah Wade, and Jude Miranda as bridging credit manager.

The new hires follow what the bank said were “three consecutive months of record lending” between March and May, and the rollout of a regulated bridging product range.

Lee, who has more than 30 years’ experience in financial services, said technology would facilitate the company’s growth ambitions in terms of scalability and by helping to speed up underwriting decisions.

“You need scalability when you’re looking to grow a business and operating in the specialist lending space. You can gather much information in terms of that application – the customer, the property, and in terms of any background information – that makes the underwriting decisions speedier,” he told Bridging Introducer.

The next stage of the process will be to develop the company’s tech platforms in-house, which he said was “crucial” if the company is to thrive in specialist markets.

“Depending on what niches and opportunities we see, the system needs to have as many plugins as it can in order to gather as much data as possible, and also to have configurable rule sets where we don’t spend six months with developers building a platform that can, for example, do commercial real estate.

“We need to be able to configure that inhouse and do it in such a way that we can switch a product on or off quite quickly,” added Lee, who has also been working alongside a newly appointed permanent head of technology since he began heading mortgage operations at Glenhawk six months ago.

The bank, which was founded in 2018 by long-term developer Guy Harrington, has until now specialised in providing competitive short-term finance for the residential and commercial sectors.

However, Lee was hired to help the bank achieve its strategic objective of moving into the specialist long-term secured space.

He revealed that he spent the first couple of months with his team mostly dedicated to identifying operational efficiencies.

He said, “It’s given me a good insight into the bridging operation. We had a ‘beauty parade’ already in terms of looking at which origination systems we’d like to use, but also looking at all the other sort of bolt-ons that we’ll need to build a system that really gives the underwriters the insight and the data they need to present it in a readily usable format.”

Lee, however, stressed that although technology would generate a greater volume of business, the human component was still needed because “it’s very difficult to make an automated decision” on niche products.

Asked if he believed Glenhawk could sustain current levels of growth, given the economic headwinds, he pointed to the fact that house prices were still growing.

According to the latest Nationwide House Price Index, house prices grew by 10.7 per cent in June; that was down by 0.5 per cent compared to May, but the Simon Lee

figures show that average prices have increased by more than £26,000 in the past year.

Lee recognised that the market could slow, but added that there was still room for growth. He said, “Clearly, ... there’s a lot of speculation on whether or not house prices are going to grow [next year].

“But when you consider the house price growth we’ve had over the last couple of years through COVID, even a drop of five to 10 per cent leaves a substantial amount of equity in a lot of properties, so I still think there’s plenty of room to move into new areas for Glenhawk and provide products that people will appreciate.”

He expressed more concern about rising mortgage rates, however, which he said could have “an impact on affordability for customers,” adding that inflationary pressures, increasing fuel and food costs, and the war in Ukraine would require “ingenuity and planning” by the bank in developing future products.

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