Virgin Money has launched a ‘manifesto for intermediaries’, featuring five promises including a commitment to making a decision on a mortgage offer within 10 working days.
The five promises include:
• paying customers £100 if they do not receive their mortgage offer within 10 working days after a fully-packaged application is made;
• giving every intermediary a dedicated, named business development manager who will “know your area and know your cases”;
• not under-pricing advisers’ customers by making it cheaper for them to go direct;
• giving 24 hours’ notice before rate increases on mortgage deals; and
• reiterating its commitment to “competitive” procuration fees.
Packs containing all five promises went out to the lender’s 17,000 brokers this morning (16 February), with Virgin Money’s mortgage director Peter Rogerson telling FTAdviser that they are the result of discussions with key account managers six months ago.
“These changes are our response to feedback we got during those conversations, we’ve listened to what our intermediary partners thought were the biggest challenges they face in the market,” he explained.
Mr Rogerson said that post-Mortgage Market Review, the feedback was that applications were taking too long, so now the bank will track application times and pro-actively contact customers if things are taking too long.
In addition to a Newcastle-based telephone support team, Virgin Money has 30 field business development managers to give a more personalised service.
“Some lenders focus the bigger accounts, while others have good national networks, but I think for our size we have the best overall coverage. That’s really important to us, seeing as 90 per cent of our lending is done through intermediaries,” stated Mr Rogerson.
Another annoyance that the group has committed to solving is when an adviser’s customers are able to find better deals direct, so it has promised that they will never be under-priced.
“We don’t keep the best deals to help us find new customers ourselves, and we know that some mortgage products may be more suited to the intermediary channel, so we’ll offer these exclusively through you,” the brochure states.
In addition to this, Virgin Money also stated that at least 24 hours’ notice will be given before it increases rates on our mortgage deals.
“We know this would infuriate intermediaries, who would do a deal with a customer during the day, only to find it had been withdrawn by the time they signed.”
peter.walker@ft.com
