After 35 years in banking and mortgages, the former football hopeful thought he might have found the company where he would see out his career. Then a cup of coffee near Euston station changed his mind.
Darrell Walker was perfectly happy. That, he admits, was what made the decision so difficult.
After four years at Chetwood Bank, where he had helped build its mortgage businesses and launch specialist buy-to-let lender ModaMortgages, Walker could quite easily have stayed. At 51, and 35 years after walking out of school and into NatWest, there was even a sense that much of the hard graft had been done.
“You get to a point where you almost become business as usual,” he says. “I probably could have seen my days out at Chetwood and been very happy.”
Then he went for a coffee near Euston station with Rod Lockhart, chief executive of LendInvest.
Walker had already spoken to John Eastgate, LendInvest’s chief commercial officer, whom he had known for years. Eastgate could give him the unvarnished version of the business. But it was the meeting with Lockhart that tipped the balance.
“Sometimes you just get a connection with someone,” Walker says. “He was very level-headed, very sincere, very driven and really cared about the business.
“I walked out of that coffee shop and thought: I can’t look back and regret this.”
RECORD LENDING
Weeks into his new job as managing director of mortgages, Walker is now responsible for turning that instinct into something rather more measurable.
LendInvest has hardly hired him to steady a sinking ship. The Aim-listed property finance group has just reported record annual lending of £1.44 billion, up 17%, while assets on its platform have risen to £3.82 billion.
Instead, Walker believes the problem is almost the opposite. LendInvest is better than many mortgage brokers realise.
During his unofficial due diligence before joining, he began asking people what they thought about the lender.
The answers tended to fall into two camps.
“It was either, ‘I don’t really know much about LendInvest’, or, ‘Darrell, they are brilliant. Good people, great systems, wonderful process’,” he says.
For a salesman, the opportunity was obvious.
“Anyone who uses us bloody loves us. We just need more people to work with us.”
BEST-KEPT SECRET
It is not, perhaps, language destined for the investor presentation. But it neatly describes the task Walker has set himself: taking what he regards as one of the mortgage market’s best-kept secrets and making considerably more noise about it.
That challenge appears to suit him. Walker has spent much of his career building things. Before Chetwood came senior roles at Shawbrook and OneSavings Bank, as well as spells at Barclays, Bank of Ireland, Lloyds Banking Group, Legal & General and Coventry Building Society.
His financial services career started in 1991 at NatWest, although banking was not necessarily the obvious destination.
As a teenager Walker had been good enough at football to be offered an apprenticeship. He chose the bank instead.
As a teenager Walker had been good enough at football to be offered an apprenticeship. He chose the bank instead. There is no lingering sense of what might have been. Indeed, Walker thinks football gave him much of what he subsequently needed in business.
“Resilience, hard work – you don’t get anywhere in football unless you’ve got that desire to be better than the next man,” he says.
More important was what he learnt about teams. The comparison he makes is not simply between a dressing room and a boardroom, but between good ones and bad ones. Successful teams, he argues, combine leadership and experience with younger people prepared to challenge those around them.
“Create an environment where it is safe to make a mistake.”
“You’ve got your captain, but you’ve also got a team of leaders. Then you’ve got younger, hungrier people who can learn from them and feed off them.
“You can create exactly that dynamic in a business: experience, leadership, compassion, with a sprinkling of the young pups coming in, giving you different ideas and pushing you.”
There is another lesson from football that has stayed with him: do not be frightened of getting something wrong.
“I was told many times on a football pitch: don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The only way you are going to get better is by trying something.
“It is the same in the boardroom. Create an environment where it is safe to make a mistake and people have the empowerment to do things.”
For all the talk across financial services about disruption and innovation, Walker’s prescription for a successful mortgage lender is strikingly unglamorous: stop looking for the silver bullet.
“We all become obsessed with trying to find that niche, trying to find something that almost doesn’t exist,” he says.
“What brokers actually find compelling is doing the simple, basic things really well, day in, day out. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. If you can’t do something, it is fine to say no – but do it quickly.”
It sounds obvious. In mortgages, where a lender’s mistake ultimately leaves an intermediary explaining the problem to a borrower, Walker thinks it is anything but trivial.
“The client isn’t interested in the lender. The broker has chosen you for that deal and explained why. If we get it wrong, the reflection on the broker is huge.”
CRADLE-TO-GRAVE
That relationship between lender and broker sits at the centre of Walker’s plans for LendInvest.
He describes it as one of the few genuinely broad specialist lenders: capable of financing a land purchase, development, bridging loan, development exit and longer-term mortgage, alongside residential and buy-to-let lending.
And although he calls it a “cradle-to-grave” proposition the problem is that customers using one part of it do not necessarily know the rest exists.
Walker has met buy-to-let brokers who love dealing with LendInvest but barely know about its other products. The same is true in bridging, an area in which he believes the company has built an exceptional reputation.
Even Walker himself admits that before considering the job, he had not appreciated the strength of LendInvest’s specialist residential mortgage range.
His ambition is for the company to become one of the first names a broker thinks of when an awkward property finance case lands on the desk.
“I want people to think: ‘I need to look at LendInvest because I know they can do a lot of stuff’.”
FUTURE PROOF
Technology is the other obvious part of the LendInvest story. The business was founded with technology at its core and describes its model as using automation, data and artificial intelligence to increase lending without increasing costs at the same rate.
Walker, by his own admission, is more salesman than technologist.
Yet even during his first few weeks he says the use of AI internally has made some routine jobs noticeably easier.
He expects much more of that. He is less convinced by the idea that machines can replace the relationships underpinning specialist finance.
“The more complex a situation, the more reason why you need a human being there to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you and help shape a solution,” he says. “Technology can absolutely help that. But in specialist lending, relationships are still king.”
That may become more important as the dividing line between mainstream and specialist mortgages continues to blur.
Walker remembers when non-standard lending was described as “niche”, as though it were a slightly mysterious corner of the mortgage industry.
That world, he argues, has gone. Borrowers’ incomes are more complicated. The structures through which people own property are more complicated. The buildings being financed can be more complicated. Economic shocks also mean otherwise straightforward borrowers can suffer temporary credit problems.
TAKING CENTRE GROUND
Specialist lending has consequently moved towards the centre of the mortgage market.
“I don’t think specialist lending itself is becoming mainstream,” Walker says. “I think there is simply much more awareness of what specialist lending can do.”
His description of the industry’s purpose is equally straightforward: “We are in the game of helping brokers say yes.”
Winning a borrower once, however, is only part of the job. Retention is another item explicitly included in Walker’s new brief, and he thinks specialist lenders have traditionally devoted too much energy to acquisition and not enough to what happens several years later.
“You almost become obsessed with getting them in the door,” he says. Keeping them requires a different mindset. A borrower who needed a specialist mortgage three or five years ago may no longer need the same product. Their finances may have improved, while competitors can quickly copy rates, products and features.
That makes price a difficult basis on which to build loyalty. The relationship is harder to replicate.
Walker regards it as a particularly powerful compliment when a borrower contacts their adviser at refinancing and asks whether the same lender can help again.
“Price isn’t even on the table at that point,” he says. “It is: ‘I trust that outfit in this situation.’ When you hear that, you know your business is doing something right.”
BOX TICKING
For somebody who has spent more than three decades selling mortgages, Walker talks surprisingly little about sales targets when asked what success at LendInvest would look like.
Yes, the company needs to lend more money. Yes, it needs more brokers using it, and Walker wants far greater awareness of its product range.
But he also has another measure. As he has grown older, Walker says his criteria for choosing jobs have changed. Once, an opportunity that ticked eight of ten boxes would have been enough. “Now I need all ten.”
“We can build the next generation of leaders.”
One of those boxes is the opportunity to develop people. He wants to look around LendInvest in two years and see younger employees whose careers have accelerated because somebody gave them the confidence and freedom to take responsibility.
“We can build the next generation of leaders,” he says. “We can build the next generation of people who will embrace technology and AI and take this industry on.”
It takes the conversation back to football: the senior players, the younger ones coming through and the strength of the dressing room.
Walker says technical mortgage knowledge can be taught. Character is harder.
“Kind, genuine, sincere, hard-working – I can’t teach people that. You’ve either got that or you haven’t.
“What I can do is take people with those qualities and help turn them into very strong individuals in this market.”
Thirty-five years after choosing a banking career over football, it is apparently still the team rather than the scoreboard that motivates him.
“That gets me out of bed in the morning all day long,” Walker says.
For now, though, there is another itch to scratch.
He left a business he liked because he feared regretting the opportunity he had passed up. His task at LendInvest is to persuade thousands of mortgage brokers that they may be overlooking one too.
