The interview

Fasten your seatbelts

It’s the first new lender since the credit crunch and brings hundreds of millions of pounds of new money to the mortgage market. Alan Cleary talks about the launch of Precise Mortgages

by

Sarah Davidson,

deputy editor, Mortgage Introducer

Alan Cleary, managing director of Precise

Mortgages, is learning to fly. He’s got the hang of getting the plane off the ground, flying it once airborne, and he tells me at his last lesson, his instructor told him he “almost” managed to land the plane himself.

The plane in question is a Piper PA 28, a single engine, two seat light aircraft. It cruises at 90 knots, or around 100mph, and has a top speed of 138 knots, or 160mph. It’s a training plane. So no jumbo jet then? “No, but I’m loving it,” says Cleary, who has just turned 41 and wanted to “learn something new”. Flying is one challenge Cleary set himself this year and it’s going pretty well. Precise Mortgages, the newly launched buy-to-let lender and Cleary’s latest endeavour, is another challenge altogether. It’s off the ground. It’s in the air. But we are yet to see whether he and the management team can really land the first new lender to launch since the credit crunch hit.

The crucial difference is that in the plane it’s just Cleary at the controls. Precise Mortgages, on the other hand, is being steered not by one pilot, but by four. Sitting in the cockpit alongside Cleary is chief executive Ian Lonergan, chief operating officer John Nixon and

24 mortgage introducer JUNE 2010

chief financial officer Sebastien Maloney. Meanwhile Phil Jenks, the renowned mortgage industry veteran, is providing the equivalent of air traffic control in his role as a non-executive director of the new lender.

ExpEriEncE

Each board member running Precise Mortgages, a sister company to Exact, has considerable experience in the lending game.

Cleary has been in the mortgage market since 1991 with lenders as diverse as NatWest, BM Solutions, Halifax and the specialist lender he launched in 2006, edeus. Lonergan hails from the edeus days too, and his experience at lender GMAC RFC should stand him in good stead at Precise Mortgages.

Nixon worked with Cleary at HBoS

before he too was instrumental in the launch of edeus, while Maloney joined Exact from Merrill Lynch in January 2009, bringing the business experience of mortgage trading, securitisation, and risk management.

Jenks is also ex-HBoS, bowing out

of his role as COO of the bank in 2008 before the Lloyds merger. It’s a heavy weight team. But many will be acutely aware of the spectre of edeus which looms in the background. But Cleary says those days are done. He and the board are serious about Precise Mortgages and serious about being a lender helping to grow a “sustainable mortgage market”.

“The market has gone from a period of excess to a period of austerity,” he muses. “I think we’ve all learnt lessons from the past. You have to recognise the market you’re in, and adapt what you’re doing.”

Lonergan, Nixon and Cleary worked together at specialist lender edeus before launching Exact, a third party mortgage administrator, in December 2008, which initially specialised in mortgage credit assessment, later branching out into third party mortgage administration, and most recently launching the lender Precise Mortgages. Ultimately, the Exact team were experienced at lending, and wanted to get back into that market. “I don’t have any regrets over my

career – what’s the point of regrets? There should be lessons that you’ve learned, and we’ve learned a lot of those. That has all culminated in what the whole team at Precise is doing today.”

planning

Precise Mortgages is the product of months of careful and considered planning according to Cleary, who is sure about what Precise Mortgages is in the mortgage market to achieve, and how different it will be from the last lender he worked for.

When asked what’s changed since the high days and holidays many associate with the peak of the mortgage market in 2006/7, Cleary says: “I haven’t changed my attitude to the industry, I still believe the broker market is the place for this Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48