The low level of young people interested in a career in protection or mortgage advice is a danger to the industry, according to one adviser working to fix it.
Hannah Bashford, the owner of Model FS - a mortgage and protection advice firm based in Kingsbridge - began working in financial services in her twenties after initially completing a degree in early childhood studies.
She spent some years working for others in the mortgage and protection space before making the decision to go out on her own and set up Model FS.
“Now we’ve been going for 10 and a half years having grown from just me in my lounge to a team with three advisers, admin and an intern,” Bashford told FTAdviser.
At the moment, the team at Model FS is women only and, although this was not by design, Bashford is passionate about getting more women and young people working in the profession.
Currently, she is in the early stages of developing her own academy to help bring new entrants into the mortgage and protection advice space.
“I'm acutely aware at the moment that there's a real lack of new talent coming into financial services.
“It’s something that I'd love to help with and get people invested in and show that it's a worthwhile career and that it can really help people,” she explained.
Recently Bashford has trained two employees in-house with no prior experience in the industry.
One of the staff members was a career-changer who joined from the police force, while the other had also never worked in the mortgage space.
“We’re getting a lot of career changers, but not many young people and that’s a dangerous place to be,” Bashford said.
“We need that energy and enthusiasm from the younger generations to keep it going.”
In Bashford’s view, a training opportunity focused on both mortgages and protection is needed for people who do not want to go down the IFA route.
“Because mortgages and protection go hand in hand, I think you can't do a good job on the mortgages, if you're not advising on the protection as well,” Bashford said.
“You either need to do it [yourself] or you need to outsource it. That's certainly how I was taught anyway,” she added.
The mortgage market has faced a tumultuous few months, after being thrown into disarray in the later half of last year as a result of the “mini” Budget and, according to Bashford, it has not yet returned to any sort of normality.
“It's still hectic. There's a lot of constant change,” Bashford said.
“I guess at the moment it is quite a stressful job. It’s time consuming and you’re doing things over and over again with rates changing, trying to do the best job for your client.”
However, since rates have started to stabilise, Bashford said people have started looking at their options again and business levels are returning.
While that’s the case with residential mortgages, buy-to-let is a different story.
Bashford described the buy-to-let market at the moment as “horrendous”.
Between high stress tests and income cover rations, she said it is “very difficult to get anything to work at the moment.”
“When rates were 1 and 2 per cent that was great, it works all day long, but now they are 4 or 5 per cent you can’t get the return on it to make the mortgage work."
"It is a very interesting time," Bashford added.
jane.matthews@ft.com
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