"We Can Balance Our Two Biggest Priorities…”

Date: 22nd February 2024

Author: Sesame Bankhall Group

Established in 1998, New Mortgage Finance – often known simply as NM – has grown to a team of 14 staff over the last 26 years.

Their small team of advisers helps customers across London and the East of England to access both regulated and unregulated funding, and has been supported by Bankhall since 2021. Over the last few years, we’ve helped them navigate the many changes that advisory firms have faced in recent times.

Steve Jackson, Insurance & Compliance Director at NM Finance, sat down with us to share his thoughts on the value Bankhall has added to the business.

We began by asking him to recap the Bankhall services they’ve taken advantage of.

“File reviews have been a big thing for us and an area where we’ve seen big improvements. But the support runs much wider – we’re often making use of the telephone-based compliance support services as a sounding board.
“Our client relationship adviser, Natalie Pollard, is brilliant and always comes back to us promptly whenever we have a query on something. Sometimes it’s just nice to get a second opinion, because there are so many grey areas in this industry. We can always rely on them to signpost and share views.
“It means we can balance our two biggest priorities: getting the right advice for our customers, and protecting the business from risks.”

Steve tells us that NM Finance used to outsource their compliance support to another firm, where they had a single point of contact. By switching to Bankhall, NM have had to raise their game:

“Working with Bankhall means there’s a healthy distance between us and our compliance support. Distance might sound like a bad thing, but it’s actually a benefit: we’ve had to make our files more structured and consistent. We can’t use our relationship with any one person as an excuse to ‘fill in the blanks’ we were leaving before; the regulator has made it clear that there is no room for assumptions in documents.
“And moving away from that single point of contact means we can get faster replies to things, because you’re not having to work around that one person’s diary.”

We asked Steve what working with Bankhall meant for NM Finance’s customers.

“We get the peace of mind that we’re doing the right thing, which in turn gives us confidence in our decision-making. But most of all, it gives us time back – and we can use that time to better serve our customers.
“We’re a small business so everyone has many hats, and we would find it impossible to do everything ourselves to the standards you need to meet these days.
“And I’d say our customers are seeing a difference, even though a lot of the support is ‘behind the scenes’. Around 75% of our business is repeat business, so those customers will certainly be seeing the improvements we’ve been able to make to things like our suitability reports.”

We wrap up by chatting, inevitably, about Consumer Duty. He tells us:

“Like most firms we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing things as part of the Consumer Duty transition. Whenever we’re making a change, we’re now asking ourselves if we’re changing thing for us, or for the customer. We can still make changes for us, but we’re conscious of making sure it always works for the customer too.
“We’ve made use a lot of the templates Bankhall have created for firms. Just having something that you can adapt to suit your business is so much easier than having to start with a blank piece of paper. It means someone else has done the thinking for you.”

Thank you, Steve, for taking the time to chat with us.

If you’d like to join NM Finance in using Bankhall’s support services, leave a few details and we’ll be in touch.