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CV: Mr Meeks has worked in the finance industry for 30 years. His roles have included senior manager and executive positions within a main retail based lender and a centralised lender, as well as the largest mortgage administration company in Europe. Mr Meeks' most recent positions have been at executive level within the Skipton Group, running four different subsidiary companies including Pink Home Loans. Following Pink's recent investment in mortgage network and packager BDS, Mr Meeks assumed the position of chief executive of The Pink Home Loans Group.

Mortgage Adviser: The first half of 2008 has been a challenging time for the industry. How has this affected Pink?

Barry Meeks: Just like everyone else we have suffered from the fact there has been a lot less transactions in the market. With the market being somewhere between 35 per cent to 45 per cent down, depending on what statistics you read, it clearly affects the amount of volume going through our business and that affects our revenues just like any other company operating in this market. So we had to be careful, we have had to look at our business and make some changes to our structure, which virtually every other person in this market has done. The second impact has really been quite encouraging from our position as a network and that has been the rapid growth in the number of businesses that have become appointed representatives with us. We think as the market has become more difficult and firms have found they have less revenue flowing through them that has meant it has become far more comfortable to be a member of a network than carry on being directly authorised.

MA: To what extent have you seen advisers gravitate towards networks?

BM: Our network numbers have increased by about 30 per cent in the last 12 months. The networks that are smaller and are perhaps run by more individual firms without strong financial backing are either just toddling along or they have been losing appointed representatives. There seems to have been a flight to quality and a flight to safety.

MA: Pink recently announced plans to add equity release and bridging loans products to its panel. How far through the process are you?

BM: We are going to be ready to launch that soon. It is part of an overall push to say that we appreciate that as our network numbers grow the skill base within our network becomes more diverse and advisers will want to access products in other markets that perhaps we historically have not been involved with.

MA: Do you believe advisers must expand in the sectors they advise on to survive the current market?

BM: The more bullets you have in the gun, the more chance you will have of hitting the target. If you have more skill and are operating in different sectors and the customer can come and talk to you about different products then you have more opportunities to earn revenue and therefore more opportunities to grow and survive and prosper. We do believe advisers need to be more diverse and if they are not and they are more specialised then clearly they need to be big enough to get a critical mass.

MA: You said earlier this year you would consider Pink becoming a fully-fledged IFA network. Can you expand on that?

BM: We are quite conscious of the fact with the squeeze going on in the mortgage market there are a number of Pink ARs that have talked to us about potentially going into broader-based IFA services. We have some firms that work with us that already have two sides to their business. We have been looking at it but we do not think there is an overwhelming need to do anything quickly. We do feel in the longer-term it is something we need to have a solution for and we are working on some options for that. We are just currently talking and thinking about what is the best way to go but we will get our ducks in line and do something about this time next year.

MA: Can you see other networks heading in the same direction?

BM: We have already seen the Mortgage Times Group go that way with Vision. They have been quite open about their plans to go to a full blown IFA network model. The current IFA networks that are out there, people like Openwork and Sesame and Legal & General, already overlap into providing network support in the mortgage sector. It is something the bigger specialist mortgage networks will have to address one way or another.

MA: You are making a large investment in technology this year. How will intermediaries benefit from that?

BM: We are a bit concerned there has been a big move in the lending sector in the last 12 months particularly for lenders who have developed their own individual websites and try to encourage advisers to go to them directly. There is still not a platform out there that brings all these disparate lenders together. Years ago Trigold and Mortgage Brain were meant to be these common trading platforms where advisers could go and key customer data and then be interconnected with all the lenders. That is just not the way those two business have developed in the last five years and they have become sourcing systems. There is still a need for a degree of connectivity across the sector and what we are trying to do is make some investments into the customer management side of our network so our advisers can key their customer details on to our systems. Then we are going to try and connect our systems to many more of the market players that we do lots of business with. A lot of the parts are already in place for this. We are not looking to build something from scratch. We will look to build the interface to link it all together and we have started that process now. We are aiming to present our vision to all our lender partners in the early part of the fourth quarter.

MA: You have said you want Pink to become one of the largest networks in the UK and significantly increase your distribution capacity. How are these plans progressing?

BM: The BDS acquisition and the growth since then has meant we now have about 600 business writers already on board and we have another 100 or so in the pipeline. Our aim is to get our business writers to a total of about 1000 by 2010 and we are pretty confident we can do that. I think that will most probably be by organic growth between both Pink and BDS. BDS also has an existing satellite packaging network of some 45 firms. Our aim in the next 12 months is to take that to about 60 or 65 and then on to hopefully 100 by 2010. We are also doing that by launching the new proposition, which is a hybrid between a satellite and a franchise and the initial reaction we are getting to that is very encouraging. We think this new proposition will be what takes that distribution strategy forward. While we may not be the largest pure appointed representative network we are also looking to building these satellites come franchises, which will be quite a powerful group in their own right. We think that combined will give us a lot of distribution power. We are also finding lenders are saying they want to work with a smaller number of distributors. They do not want to work with hundreds of packagers and hundreds of mortgage clubs. They want to work with maybe between 10 and 20 major distributors and that means they do not have to manage so many exclusive relationships and exclusive products. By growing bigger we are going to be one of those key players and we are already getting exclusive products offered to us where other distributors are not. We are already seeing lenders want to get closer to us because we are a powerful distributor. Even though we are not yet the biggest, and we may never be the biggest, we have to set ourselves some big hairy goals and move forward.

MA: Does this mean some distributors could struggle?

BM: All of our technology plans are geared towards giving our lender and supplier partners a lot more confidence in the quality of business they get from Pink's networks and it will be better and far superior than maybe other networks who are not investing that much more in the quality and are perhaps going more for volume or are continuing to get business from a much less controlled distribution base. We are seeing a lot more lenders coming in now saying they want better quality. They want to know where the business is coming from and they want to know what the compliance is. In a market that is tougher you need to make decisions that might not look sensible today but put you in a stronger position over time and that will require investment and having a balance sheet that allows you to take that longer-term view. I think that is where some networks and distributors will struggle. We have seen that happen with lenders.

MA: What would you say is intermediaries perception of Pink?

BM: We are viewed as innovative and approachable. We are seen as a firm with a unique culture and one of the reason we acquired BDS is we saw some similar cultural values within it.