The Interview
The future’s bright. The future’s blue
The mortgage market is peppered with Scotsmen, but perhaps one of the best known is David Finlay, intermediary channel director, Woolwich – Barclays’ mortgage division
David Finlay has been around for more than 10 years at Barclays Woolwich and is still as passionate about the industry today as he was at day one. “I always found financial services
interesting and – maybe being a Scot,” he says with a self-deprecating wink, “working with personal finance appealed. “I love working with the brokers, I love
working with mortgages,” he says. “It’s at the heart of our community. Everyone wants to own their own home and we have that culture of homeownership that I don’t think will ever really leave us.” It’s an important principle to keep in
mind because the past three years have been tough, but Barclays has been one of the few lenders to get through the ups and downs still intact. It’s been down to a responsible attitude
to risk, says Finlay. But then that’s been the case since 2005/2006. “About five years ago when I took
over as intermediary director, we made a conscious decision as a business that we were no longer going to sell pound coins for 90p,” says Finlay. In 2005 lenders were scrapping for
market share and many were selling products at a loss just to stay in the game. At the height of the mortgage market the Woolwich’s decision to turn against that tide looked like a risky strategy but Finlay assures me the opposite was true. Finlay believed that quality was better
than quantity and it’s seen Barclays through the credit crunch, crisis and recession to a position of financial strength in 2010. In early August the bank reported a
28 morTgage inTroducer SEPTEMBER 2010
44% jump in profits to £3.95bn in the first six months of the year. Indeed, the mortgage division has grown 12% on last year to having a mortgage balance of £98.7 billion. The lender has added 79,000 new customers to its book in the same period taking the tally of UK mortgage borrowers with a Woolwich mortgage to 913,000. Mortgage market share is now 8% - up
from 6% in 2007. The cynical among you may reason that increasing market share as one of the top large lenders over the
past three years hardly takes a genius if the funds are there, but Finlay says there is strategy in play. “There are two reasons we’ve made a
success of the past few years,” explains Finlay. “We really pushed hard on our offset mortgage, which was obviously one of our flagship products, and we’re now seeing more than one in five of our intermediated mortgages being offset. If you think that the offset market in the UK is somewhere between 9% and 11%, that in itself is a great result.
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