The Intermediary – February 2025 - Flipbook - Page 60
Q&A
show, I spoke to a few of the experts, and they’re
all very positive about BTL, and believe that again
this sector will break the mould, uncover new
opportunities, and move forward.
Above all, and with all these factors, the
thing that I can definitely see happening for the
foreseeable is that a lot more clients are going to
be pushed into the complex and specialist arena.
Those that might have been previously classed
as high street, mainstream clients will now need
to finance and refinance with special lenders, for
various reasons.
One of the things that has become clear in the
past 12 to 18 months is that ever more lenders are
actually rising to the challenge of the changing
client profile.
These lenders are starting to look at their
offerings and realise that they don’t have the
products to necessarily fit, so we are seeing
lenders adapt and innovate to make lending more
accessible to everyone.
This expansion can be seen elsewhere, as well.
I recently had a call from a mainstream lender
asking about putting together a whole new
Shariah-compliant product, something completely
new for them. Lenders are definitely looking at
new areas of lending.
Credit must go to lenders. A few years on from
the onset of Covid-19, they are really identifying
that there’s a whole new type of client in the
market – these clients are the same people, but
they have a whole new lending need. I hope we
see that same lender innovation and flexibility
continue throughout 2025.
So, looking beyond the event,
what does 2025 look like for
Brilliant Solutions?
Again, there will probably be more of the same
aspects we saw in 2024. That was an absolutely
fantastic year for us commercially.
Aside from that, we’ve been developing and
evolving. We just see such a massively increased
demand in our sector, and we’ve spent a lot of time
over the past year evolving our whole ‘brilliant’
proposition to meet that.
For 2025, we’ve got a real focus on forging even
stronger relationships.
We’ve brought out our brand new broker
proposition ‘Brilliant Plus’, which rewards brokers
who work closely with us, or who want to do so
even more.
That side of it, for us, is massively important –
our relationship with brokers across the UK.
We place so much value on relationships, and
that’s something we want to see evolve and grow
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The Intermediary | February 2025
We get to know brokers, because
we’ve been around for a long time, so
we understand those who are working
remotely and we do try and target
them for our events”
in 2025. Our events programme is probably the
biggest it’s ever been, including the amazing UK
Mortgage Convention. We’ve got more roadshows,
more round-tables.
When we first set out to do these events, we
always try and target the remote brokers.
We get to know brokers, because we’ve been
around for a long time, so we understand those
who are working remotely and we do try and
target them for our events. This year we want to
do a lot more of that.
We’re fully committed to taking all our business
platforms, the mortgage club, second charge,
mortgage packaging, bridging, commercial, and
everything else in between, to more brokers,
especially as we’ve spent time and money refining,
honing and evolving all platforms. We’re in a
fantastic place for broker business across the
board moving forward.
We’ve also got some really good stuff we’re
working on for later on in the year that I can’t
discuss in detail, and we’ve brought in some great
third-party partnerships, from general insurance
(GI) to IFAs, through to that Shariah relationship.
We’ve got a lot more of that to come as well.
One of the big trends for 2025 that I see is that
brokers will be looking at different opportunities.
So, there’s a lot of brokers out there who have only
ever done mainstream mortgages, but now they’re
seeing the opportunity of other areas such as
specialist lending, protection or third-party referral
opportunities for pension and investment advice,
wills or GI, so there will be a lot more third-party
relationships created.
It has never been more important for a mortgage
broker to build up trust with a distributor –
whether that’s us or one of the others, it doesn’t
matter, they need to be building a relationship,
finding a distributor that covers as many channels
as possible.
However the market is still how it has always
been, in that it’s all about trust with a company
that’s going to give you as many options as
possible, to be able to do more business and help
brokers grow and evolve their business throughout
2025 and beyond. ●