Mortage Introducer Talk Mortage Introducer Talk

In this week’s Mortgage Introducer Talk podcast, we meet Jess Rushton, who is head of business development at Smart Money People, a UK website that has over one-and-half-million reviews of financial services. It uses the data provided in those reviews – customer hindsight - to create better foresight, and therefore an improved service, going forward. “We cover both consumers and intermediaries in terms of lender feedback,” says Rushton. “And now we find that a lot of lenders actually use our service to collect broker feedback all year round. So, they’re very keen to understand what brokers want on a month-to-month basis.”

For this edition of Mortgage Introducer Talk, Simon Meadows meets Kharla Mullen, who is chief operating officer at Countrywide Surveying Services - which conducts valuations and surveys of properties for lenders and purchasers. Too many people are failing to protect themselves by neglecting to get a survey, Mullen says. She explains about the critical role that brokers can play in encouraging home buyers to become better informed about the property they are buying. 2024 has started encouragingly, Mullen shares, with data suggesting a busy period of property sales in January.

For this Mortgage Introducer Talk, Simon Meadows meets Leon Diamond, the founder and CEO of LiveMore, a lender that serves the over fifties market. Diamond casts his eye over a career that’s taken him from Australia to the UK, driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and witnessing the problems his older relatives experienced trying to borrow in later life. “Our oldest borrower is a 99-year-old lady who took out a mortgage,” he says. “We’re very proud of that. We see this area as being quite underserved in the UK, but yet there’s strong demand coming through.”

Mortgage Introducer Talk meets John Jeffery, who is managing partner at later life lending specialist Senior Capital. An experienced statistician, Jeffery set up the business with his business partner Rudy Khaitan. He has some sage advice for brokers trying to maximise business. “It’s very simple economics,” Jeffery advises. “You need to be able to offer solutions, as many solutions, as wide a menu, as you can, to the people you distribute to. So, I would say focus on that because the drop down profitability from better conversion is 100%. It’s the best type of revenue you can generate.”

For this edition of Mortgage Introducer Talk, we meet Melanie Spencer, who is business partnership & growth director at One Mortgage System, which is a market leader in mortgage technology and lender integration. Spencer reflects on her twenty year career in the mortgage industry, the way it has changed and become more inclusive for women and the mentorship, camaraderie and friendship she has found in the profession. She considers how she has tried to stay ‘ahead of the curve’ throughout her working life. “The world is your oyster in this industry,” Spencer enthuses.

Joining us on the this edition of Mortgage Introducer Talk we have George Sanford, specialist broker at Vibe Specialist Finance. He enthuses about the wide variety of work that he does day to day and reflects on his working life so far, which he started as a builder, temporarily, before taking up a project management role with J. P. Morgan Chase. In his current role at Vibe, Sanford values the relationship building with others. “It’s such a crucial part of being a good broker is having that relationship with your clients and lenders and with the rest of the team,” he says.