"As well as this commitment to growing our team over the coming weeks and months, we will also announce a number of major product and criteria changes"
- Marie Grundy, managing director of residential mortgages and second charges
West One Loans has announced a major recruitment drive as part of its growth plans in both the residential and second charge markets, alongside a new fast track remortgage service.
West One has created two new senior positions under Marie Grundy, managing director of residential mortgages and second charges.
Grundy remains responsible for driving the overall strategy for both residential and second charge lending but will be supported in the day-to-day running of both divisions by Pauline Rylands and Paul Huxter.
Rylands, previously national sales manager, has been appointed head of specialist distribution and will provide dedicated support to packaging partners across both residential mortgages and second charges. The lender is also in the process of recruiting several key account managers to help Rylands deepen its relationships with key packagers.
Broker support manager, Lizzie Fonsecca, and her team will continue to support Rylands and will gain additional resource as part of the lender’s expansion plans.
Huxter, previously head of clubs and networks, becomes head of intermediary sales and distribution, and will oversee a newly created field sales team, which the lender is currently recruiting for.
In his new role, Paul will continue to manage West One’s club and network partnerships but will also now take responsibility for residential mortgage club and network broker firms.
To support him, West One plans to recruit several new regional account managers as well as increasing the number of telephone business development managers to support the field-based team.
The first recruit, David Venn, previously national account manager at Tanem Bank, joined this week as regional account manager for the South East.
Over the coming months, the lender says it will also announce enhancements to its products, pricing and criteria.
The first of those changes sees West One overhaul its legal process.
Going forward, West One’s fast track remortgage service has a fixed fee of £99, positioned as an alternative to free legals products.
It is available on unencumbered properties for the first time and on remortgages of up to £750,000 for borrowers in England, Wales and Scotland for both like-for-like and capital raising remortgages up to 90% LTV, including debt consolidation.
The service is also available at a lower cost for mortgages under £400,000 using the lender’s dual representation legal service as well as for borrowers using separate legal representation.
As before, with the lender’s fast-track remortgage service, the legal work starts on receipt of application.
West One says the service has enabled borrowers to complete as quickly as within four days of receipt of the application with average offer to completion times of 11 days from offer to completion during 2024.
Marie Grundy, managing director of residential mortgages and second charges at West One Loans, said: “This is an exciting new chapter in our ambition to drive exponential growth in both our residential mortgage and second charge business.
“The past 18 months have provided us with a fantastic opportunity to learn and test our residential mortgage proposition and now the time is right to put the pedal down.
“Over that time we have been working closely with our brokers to understand their priorities and their needs and now we feel we are in a position to ramp up our offering in this area. To do that, we need to grow, which is why we have embarked on such a major recruitment drive.
“As well as this commitment to growing our team over the coming weeks and months, we will also announce a number of major product and criteria changes that we believe will create the most competitive product proposition in the specialist residential and second charge markets. Watch this space.”
