The interview
Get your head in the game
David Tweedy, brand leader at Platform, gets tactical. Having been part of the mortgage market through two recessions, he says there are similar lessons to be learned from both - even though the causes and consequences of both have been very different
by
Sarah Davidson, deputy editor, Mortgage Introducer
David Tweedy, director of intermediary lender Platform is not just a mortgage player. He’s a hockey player. This might seem like a superfluous piece of information, but there is a uniting factor. Teamwork. Many sports are dominated by individuals, but ice-hockey (the sport Tweedy has played most of his life) requires a team. Even the star players can’t do it alone; they need to work with their team to make the side a success. It’s just not possible to play this sport solo. Perhaps the most important thing about teamwork on the rink is that not everyone can be the best defence, or the best scorer. The coach determines each player’s strengths and weaknesses and works out how best to play them. Mistakes are par for the course (to mix my metaphors) and teams that dwell on them are destined to fail. It’s making mistakes that helps a team to learn, improve and ultimately win.
‘When you make a mistake, admit it’, goes the mantra. Your teammates will respect you more and you will be less likely to make that mistake again.
34 mortGaGe introducer JULY 2010
The greatest skill above all in hockey, is not the ability to skate. Nor is it the ability to score. Nor the ability to pass. It’s being able to play as part of a team.
Teamwork David Tweedy, brand leader of Platform, is used to being part of such a team, not only on the ice, but also in the mortgage market.
Known as “Tweeds” to his team mates at Slough Tornados, his recreational ice-hockey side, Tweedy now plays the game for fun but has kept the sport up since high school, at one point thinking he might even turn pro.
“I was at a level in high school where I could have gone down the professional route, but going to university was the deciding factor. I could have gone on a sports scholarship to university or borrow a load of money and head to a more academic university - I chose the latter!” he tells me with a glint of nostalgia in his eye.
In the game between sports and academics then, getting his head down to business won for Tweedy, and he went on to study economics at one of America’s most prestigious Ivy League schools, Princeton. But ice-hockey has stayed a part of his life and his attitude to working at Platform more often than not mirrors his roles on the ice.
“I’ve coached youth ice-hockey for
eight or nine years, and some of those teams won national championships,” he says.
SpiriT Tweedy definitely has a spirit of fight in him. It’s obvious he wants to do well and that means Platform doing well. Although it hasn’t been an easy journey at times Tweedy is the first to admit that the excitement of it all has more than made up for it.
“I got into mortgages by accident,” he tells me with a wry smile. “I grew up in Boston, went to Princeton and majored in economics then ended up in New York and moved to London with Morgan Stanley as an accountant on one of their trading desks.
“I found accountancy was about looking backwards and I wanted to get into a more forward looking industry – so I chose mortgages and in 1988 started at The Mortgage Corporation, a wholesale funded, centralised lender, as a financial analyst in a product development role.” Just one year later and Tweedy was the first employee of Platform “when it was literally just me and a cardboard box with a computer on it”.
For the next 21 years he sailed with Platform through the late 80s boom and bust in the early 90s, riding the wave thereafter as managing director of the lender from 1999 onwards and
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