The Interview


DirectING business through brokers


ING Direct launched its intermediary offering with Legal & General in April last year. Sarah Davidson speaks to ING’s mortgage director Julian Hartley to find out how it’s panning out


For ING Direct, its name was a defining moniker underlining its commitment to serving customers directly. That was until April last year when the lender made a measured debut into the broker market by partnering with Legal & General mortgage club. The venture was a success and ING


now distributes its mortgages through L&G, Sesame, Openwork and Personal Touch Financial Services. “We always said when we launched


the mortgage side of the business that we’d go into the intermediary market when it made sense. We launched the pilot with L&G last year because we felt the time was right and were pleased with the results,” explains Julian Hartley, who joined the lender in 2003 becoming mortgage director in 2009. “Intermediary distribution complements


the direct channel for us. Some people are confident enough to research the mortgage market themselves and come to us directly. Others want the reassurance a broker can give and we felt giving people that choice was the right thing to do.” The decision was also a function


of market make-up. Roughly 60% of mortgage applicants go through intermediaries, 30% through branches


46 mortGaGe INtroDucer JULY 2011


(something ING doesn’t have) and the remaining 10% directly to lenders like ING. The lender planned to grow its share of


new lending in the UK, and inevitably that meant engaging with intermediaries. “We are also planning to grow this


year,” explains Hartley. “We’re not planning to become a top five player but we would like to be one of the significant others. To give you an idea of our preparation for that, at the end of 2009 our entire mortgages team was around 40 people. We’re now just shy of 200 people. That reflects our growth ambition.”


LearnIng curve


Why the drive now when the overall market remains stagnant? “Margins for lenders are healthy,” says


Hartley. “Part of the reason for that is there is still limited funding available and the market is relatively flat. We’re bringing new money into the market, which our large savings book allows us to do.” For Hartley the move from direct-only


channels to intermediary distribution has been a learning curve – one that is still in progress. At launch with L&G, ING did not have separate IT systems in place to allow


brokers to complete clients’ applications and the relationship worked essentially on a referral basis only. However, the past year has seen the lender develop its systems to build a platform that caters for intermediaries specifically. “It’s important for us that we provide


fantastic service,” says Hartley. “We have chosen to do that by keeping things simple and making it as easy as possible for customers to deal with us.” That’s the thing that binds the direct


and intermediary offering together: customer service. “My background is predominantly in


customer service,” explains Hartley. “And I think one of the things that sets us apart is that we view ourselves as consumer champions. People clearly want to access independent advice and our feeling is that customers should be able to access our mortgages via that route.” Rather than being separate though, the


two channels have more in common than at other lenders. ING never dual prices, it doesn’t give brokers or direct channels access to specials and customers can access exactly the same products at the same price however they choose to deal with the lender. “Clearly the crucial difference for the customer is how much they do


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