The Right Mortgage & Protection Network revealed improved business volumes and appointed representative (AR) firm/adviser numbers at its recent National Training Event in Birmingham.

Looking at the year to date, the network announced the total number of mortgage completions are 8% up on 2022 at 24,010, while total lending volume is up 4% on the previous year at £4.5 billion.

The network now houses 350 AR firms, with 26 new businesses having joined so far in 2023 with the number of new advisers who have joined reaching 127. This means there are 728 advisers within the network as of today.

The National Training Event was entitled ‘Diversifying Your Business’ and focused on supporting firms in broadening their product and service propositions, particularly in areas beyond mortgages such as protection, private medical insurance, general insurance, and later life lending.

The Right Mortgage said this focus on ancillary sales opportunities was already starting to be seen in 2023 with private medical insurance Annual Premium Income (API) up above £23 million for the year to date, a 45% increase on the same period in 2022. While income protection sales had also doubled year-on-year.

Nicola Ventrella, operations director at The Right Mortgage, said: “Firstly, we’d like to thank everyone who attended, presented, exhibited and sponsored our National Training Event which, I think it’s fair to say, was our biggest and best yet.

“We were able to announce some very strong business figures, across mortgage, protection and other sectors, and that is testament to the hard work and efforts of all our AR firms and their advisers.

“It’s also pleasing to be able to announce continued growth in both our AR firm numbers and the number of advisers within the network, as this ensures we can continue to offer the widest range of product options and services to these businesses, and to provide even greater levels of support so they can meet their ambitions.

“There’s no doubting 2023 has presented a number of significant challenges for advisers, particularly from a mortgage point of view, so we felt it was important to focus on the ways and means by which firms could ride out these current market conditions, while making the most of the business that is available, and ensuring they have as many strings to their service bow as possible.

“This is why we focused significantly on the options and opportunities available to firms away from the central mortgage advice one, and as a network we believe it is vitally important that our AR firms and advisers have access to whatever they need in product areas such as protection or PMI or general insurance or equity release.

“We have grown our offering in those areas, and we want to ensure firms have a strong strategy in place to cover off as many product needs and solutions for clients as possible.

“Overall, we were very pleased with the event itself, and the engagement from our AR firms. We appreciate the time they have taken out of their working week to join us and we hope they were able to pick up plenty of useful help, support, tips and information to continue to develop their overall business propositions and to grow their income levels.”