A Hidden Gem
Mortgage Minds Profile
Your Mortgage magazine, December 2006

Mortgage Minds recently celebrated its third birthday, but still remains off the radar of many customers. With expansion plans in place, that could be set to change in the coming months.

The Mortgage Times Group may be a household name to those who earn their crust in the mortgage industry, but it probably doesn't trip off the tongue of the average mortgage borrower.

This may be because its main business has been its mortgage network, an umbrella group to which advisers belong for compliance needs and support. You would have no reason to have heard of, or deal with, the Mortgage Times Group. But its independent mortgage broking division, Mortgage Minds, should be more familiar. And if it isn't yet, then the plan is for that to all change in the future.

Mark Bowler, director of Mortgage Minds, is aware of the brokerage relatively low profile to date and describes it as Mortgage Times’ best-kept secret. Although operating primarily out of offices on Tottenham Court Road in central London, Mortgage Minds is very much a national business with brokers operating right across the country and throughout the North, Including Manchester and Newcastle.

It currently employs 70 advisers, but has plans to grow this number to around 200 in 2007. Bowler has 26 years' experience in the financial services industry and is still an active independent financial adviser himself.

Broad interests
The Mortgage Times Group itself was launched in February 2002 and has grown to become the second largest mortgage network in the UK.

Mortgage Minds was launched just under two years later in January 2004 and targeted a place alongside established London brokerages in the market for larger mortgages. While this is where much of Mortgage
Minds' business comes from, Bowler is keen to stress that the broker operates across the whole spectrum of mortgage lending and will consider all kinds of cases.

In a similar vein, the broker is keen not to pigeonhole itself as a specialist in a particular sector and says it has expertise across a number of areas, including buy-to-let, self certification and Right to Buy. "I think you close certain doors if you brand yourself as a specialist in a particular area," says Bowler. "We want to he strong across all the sectors."

Mortgage Minds claims it has access to over 4,000 different mortgage products from over l00 lenders and many of these are available on an exclusive basis, meaning certain borrowing criteria can be adapted to better suit the individual applicant.

The brokerage will use its expertise to guide you through this extensive maze of options and, for its most frequently-used lenders, it has a dedicated team of underwriters who have the ability to issue offers at the click of a button, which is a boon if speed is a vital part of your application.

Statutory regulation of the mortgage industry was introduced in October 2004, but Bowler says that Mortgage Minds was more than prepared for the regime given that much of the original team had experience of operating in regulated industries and saw regulation as an opportunity, not a threat.

Therefore, rest assured that if you sit down with a Mortgage Minds broker to talk through the most suitable product for your needs, the advice you receive should be sound and fair.

Regulations
Over 60 per cent of all mortgage business in the UK is currently conducted through mortgage brokers and with an increasingly complicated plethora of products to choose from, Bowler expects this trend to continue and even possibly increase.

At the moment, most mortgages are regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), but some sectors such as buy-to-let remain outside its remit. "I think eventually all types of mortgages, including buy-to-let, will be regulated and this is right as there is so much cross-filtering between them” he says. “We have always treated all business we do as if it is regulated anyway to ensure that we are doing the right thing."

Mortgage Minds takes regulation very seriously indeed, and says that its compliance department is consequently one of its busiest departments. All brokers who join Mortgage Minds automatically become an appointed representative member of The Mortgage Times Group's network.

Familiarity
In terms of expanding its number of advisers from 70 to 200, Mortgage Minds plans to snaffle top people from rival firms as well as producing its own fresh batch of newly-qualified staff from its training academy.
Bowler expects the word-of-mouth reputation of the company to grow substantially through attendance at exhibitions and events and hopes this will attract good brokers to come and join the group.

Bowler hopes Mortgages Minds will be a more familiar name by the end of the year and thinks that a sound proposition will ensure that this is the case. "By offering genuine, professional mortgage advice across a number of specialist markets, we aim to become a bigger player” he says. "We have the infrastructure in place to cope with sufficient growth and are confident that we will provide the service level people have come to expect."