News Review
Nationwide for Intermediaries celebrates 4 years By Yuan Phoon
The deep end of a reces- sion is far from an ideal time to launch a new enterprise however Nationwide chose the time to launch an in- termediary dedicated sales force to drum up more busi- ness. While other lenders re- trenched, Nationwide began recruiting in March of 2008 and one of its first appoint- ments was Ian Andrew as then head of intermediary sales, to now MD. Andrew understood that at the time Nationwide was already on the back foot in terms of its reputation – es- pecially when stacked up against other lenders owing much to the fact that it didn’t have a business development manager team. An opening wave of 48
BDMs were recruited along with six regional managers and after undergoing a three month recruiting process and three month training process, Nationwide for Intermediar- ies launched in April 2008 with the intention to provide face-to-face support to every broker in the UK. Andrew believes that the
key was to provide brokers with BDMs who offered more than a sales pitch. “We trained the BDMs
to take a more consultative role,” says Andrew. “Rather than just pitch about our products, we encourage our team to learn about a broker’s business and work with his business to help them diver- sify into new income streams. This was critical as the inter- mediary contribution to the mortgage market was begin- ning to slide.
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Andrew. “So we’re looking to make cases go through faster and so brokers can get paid faster.”
Late last year TMW
“We now have 50 BDMs and no telephone team.”
A different model Telephone teams are essential to most lenders. The ease to be able to pick up the phone to a representative and over- turn an issue within a couple of minutes is to some invalu- able. But Andrew believes there’s something else funda- mental which makes his team more effective. There is no dedicated call- centre for NFI. Instead the BDMs take on that role on top of their own. “In a sense we have a fran-
chise model,” Andrew con- tinues. “A BDM has respon- sibility for every broker in their territory. They are on the phones and they’re conduct- ing business face-to-face. “The consultative role they
play means that our force can help brokers identify markets they aren’t involved in and generate income through di- versification.”
The whole package Nationwide for Intermediar- ies has 168 products available and that does not include the
58 products from The Mort- gage Works which the BDM team is also trained on. “There are very few mar-
kets that Nationwide doesn’t lend in,” says Andrew. “We’re very proud of our mutual sta- tus and a part of that is to pro- vide solutions to our mem- bers and that means having a broad spread of products and being involved in most of the purchase and remortgage market.”
The Mortgage Works TMW has become a titan in the growing buy-to-let space. Industry consensus is that
TMW and BM Solutions to- gether do between 66% and 80% of all buy-to-let lending. “When the specialist mar-
ket contracted we became one of the primary suppliers of buy-to-let mortgages,” ex- plains Andrew. “We welcome the increased competitive- ness but there is no doubt that our position in the mar- ket will remain unchanged.”
What brokers want “At the moment brokers are looking for
technology to make their lives easier,” says
launched an app for iPhone and iPads off the back of ad- viser research. The app is a buy-to-let affordability calcu- lator and at the time of writ- ing had 500 downloads. The genesis of the app was a result of the BDM-broker relationship. Every day Na- tionwide’s BDMs are getting feedback and at the end of every week each region has to produce a report on what it is brokers want. “We disseminate that infor- mation and use it to improve our business,” Andrew says. Last year brokers wanted
to have a faster way of being able to process cases and so NFI Online was launched. Andrew says the system still has its limitations. “We want to be able to do more and improve our of- fering. So we’ll be making changes to our system to al- low us to deliver more to our brokers and get their cases through faster.”
Progress Andrew acknowledges that looking back every mis-step was taken on board as an- other learning process and another opportunity to do better. “There are a high num- ber of things we can do bet- ter and improve on. We’ve got the fundamentals right and our commitment to the intermediary market is ab- solute. It’s now about fine- tuning and making sure we don’t settle we’ve got.”
with what MORTGAGE INTRODUCER MARCH 2012 27
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