Spotlight Jade Keval on being a woman in the sector

A woman’s work

As sales director for SoMo, Jade Keval is thriving in a market where women were once few. If your mind’s focused, you can achieve your goal, she tells Mortgage Introducer

“W hen I joined SoMo nearly seven years ago, there were six of us,” recalled sales director Jade Keval. “It was exciting; a small company that was growing. Now we’ve grown to 80-plus staff. We kitted out our new office in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, just before COVID, and nobody could come into it. We traded right the way through the pandemic, which was incredible for us as a lender.

“I decided to continue coming in and because I’m a single mother, my son Jayden was in one of the boardrooms doing schoolwork, right the way through both lockdowns. One of the things that’s kept me at SoMo is the human element that we’ve got here. So many companies say that they’re a huge family, but we really are.”

Keval added, “Balance is a very big thing for us. We have meditation in the office, we’ve got counsellors if people want to go and speak to them. So it is quite a big thing, the culture within SoMo.”

This culture has clearly paid off for SoMo; an abbreviation of Social Money Ltd, it offers peer-to-peer bridging loans – short-term finance secured on UK property. Forty people work within the group’s bridging division, and, according to its own figures, as of August this year, 1,168 loans had been made, to a value of £237m. Its completion rates are 21 per cent higher than the industry average, it says.

GOOD AT NUMBERS

“I have been in financial services since I left school,” said Keval. “I was actually a shopkeeper’s daughter. My dad had a few Spar shops, and when they upgraded the till systems,

Jade Keval and son

the old ones used to come home, and we had a little shop in the garage.

“I had my son when I was 18. I was sitting down thinking about what I was going to do with my life. The only thing that I was ever really good at was numbers and talking to people. I started off in the high street banks and absolutely loved it. The recession hit and I started as a case manager for a bridging company.”

She continued, “I hadn’t heard of bridging. It wasn’t a viable funding option for most people. Talking with solicitors, valuers, and clients and understanding deals just clicked with me. Structuring a deal, especially with bridging finance, wasn’t like working for

“I was sitting down thinking about what I was going to do with my life. The only thing that I was ever really good at was numbers and talking to people. I started off in the high street banks and absolutely loved it”

a bank. It wasn’t a tick-box exercise. I quickly became a business development manager [BDM], and have been doing bridging ever since.”

When Keval started, it was still unusual for women to be working in bridging. “It was a bit of a boys’ club, and I think women had to work doubly hard,” she said. “Now if you look across the market, there are loads of really good female BDMs doing this job. If you can find yourself a great mentor, ask the right questions, and retain that knowledge, you can do well.”

When it was founded in 2014, SoMo was the UK’s first platform dedicated solely to secured bridging property loans.

“The reasons why people are borrowing money are so different,” Keval noted. “Of course, we’re in an unregulated field in terms of SoMo. We can look at deals on a deal-by-deal basis and look at the bigger picture. We can say yes a lot more, where the mainstream lenders would have to say no.”

A BUSY SECTOR

The specialist finance sector as a whole, and bridging in particular, continue to be busy, she said, with enquiries coming in from those who say they have been let down by other lenders. “Bridging really boomed through the last recession,” Keval pointed out. “Rates have increased, there’s no point denying it, but we’re still a viable option and we know how we can help clients.”

SoMo is eyeing further growth, including a timely new product to support clients facing insolvency. “There are certain scenarios where clients just want to buy themselves a bit more time to be able to gain control of things,” Keval explained.

Her positive attitude has clearly served her well in achieving her recent promotion.

“It’s a huge thing, to be sales director, at the age of 32, being female in this industry, as a single mother,” Keval said. “I like the fact that my son can look up to me and say, ‘Yes, she did all right.’ I’m a big believer that if you can get your mind right in terms of something that you want to do, then you can achieve it.” M I