Important Together Business Update

It’s unfortunately become a well-used phrase but these are unprecedented times, for everyone, but also within the mortgage industry. In our 45 year history, we’ve never encountered anything like this.  But we remain determined to work together with our colleagues, customers and valued business partners to rise to the challenge in the way that we have to others in the past.

We’ve been reviewing the current situation and listening fully to Governmental guidance and have been able to safely enable over 700 colleagues to work from home and implement a process to assist our existing customers through these difficult times. 

We’ve had to make some difficult decisions. We recently announced that we would stop accepting new applications for the time being as we reviewed the pipeline and we can now communicate the following.

These changes will now apply across both our Commercial Finance and Personal Finance applications in pipeline:

Cases at Pre offer stage

All cases are on hold until further notice. We’ll constantly review this and communicate further, either holistically or on specific cases when this changes. Unfortunately, in this market, we’re not able to put a timescale on this right now.

Cases at Offer stage

Where we’ve issued an offer, our underwriters will continue to review cases and will communicate next steps with you as soon as they can.

Purchases

• Where a case has already exchanged, we’ll review the customer’s affordability to ensure this is still right for them.
• Where the case is offered and not exchanged as of 3rd April 2020, we’ll pause the application for an initial 3 months. We’ll constantly review our processes in line with market conditions and government advice, but for now, we will not progress these cases.

Remortgage & other products

We’ll undertake a full review of the customer’s affordability to ensure it’s affordable, still right for them and that they want to proceed.

• Where the current property value can be established (and with validated affordability), the case can progress.
• Where the property value cannot be confirmed and/or affordability validated, the offer will be suspended and reviewed when appropriate. Again we cannot, in the current circumstances put a timescale on this.

In Commercial Finance where a case is below 50% loan to value and where we can be confident that affordability is both sustainable and plausible we’ll look to progress these cases. If this is a bridging case we'll also need to be confident around the exit.

We’re working as fast as we can.  We’ll contact your customers directly and we’ll keep you updated on your cases as quickly as possible.

If you have any specific questions about offered cases, continue to call us on the number you’ve always used, and we’ll do our best to answer them.  Please refrain from calling if your case has not offered as the information given above will apply.

Our teams are working incredibly hard helping our brokers and customers; our SLAs have understandably been adversely impacted as we prioritise the existing customer communication so please bear with us.

We do not underestimate the impact that this will have on you and your clients and we have not made these changes without very careful consideration of all factors involved. We do however feel that these changes are necessary to support our colleagues, existing clients and the position of both us as a lender and anyone entering into a new financial transaction in these unpredictable times.

I wish you and your families well and appreciate as ever the support that you give us and I sincerely hope will be able to give us in the future.

Stay safe,

Richard Tugwell