Profile
Rising to the challenge
Nigel Stockton is one of the mortgage industry’s best known characters. Formerly director of sales for mortgages at Lloyds Banking Group and now at Countrywide, Sarah Davidson takes a look at what Stockton hopes to achieve in 2011 and how he plans to do it
If there’s one thing successful people have in common it’s ambition.
Nigel Stockton certainly has it in abundance so the industry watched with interest when he announced his decision to defect from the nation’s largest lender, LBG, to join the nation’s largest broker, Countrywide, in October last year. Four months on and the move is beginning to make sense. After learning the ropes under friend and Countrywide chief executive, Grenville Turner, Stockton was announced as director of financial services in early January – a step up from his initial responsibilities as financial services development director. He is now in the process of taking over the mortgage and insurance divisions from industry veteran and Countrywide’s managing director of Countrywide Principal Services, Alan Snowball, after he announced his retirement from the broker last month. What originally looked like a sales job for Stockton, 44 and with just shy of two decades’ experience in NatWest, HBOS and LBG, now looks considerably more heavyweight – especially given a position on the board. But Stockton tells me his real motivation was intellectual. Life is about the next challenge as well as the next achievement, he says.
“Lloyds was
great to me throughout my seven years there but I liked the opportunity that Countrywide was offering,” he says. “It’s the largest broker in the UK and the potential it has seemed exciting and probably more of a challenge than I was looking forward to in Lloyds in the next couple of years. “It’s that sense of challenge that inspires me. I’ve realised the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is the
challenge of making something better, running something more efficiently, making more money. It’s a puzzle almost and I like puzzles.”
24 moRtgage intRoduceR FEBRUARY 2011 Conundrums
The puzzle Stockton faces is how to grow the financial services business and align it efficiently with the rest of
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