Three decades into a career she never really planned, Louisa Sedgwick sits at the helm of one of the most closely watched businesses in UK specialist lending.
As managing director, mortgages at Paragon Bank, she is leading the bank’s charge into the next phase of buy-to-let – one defined by technology, regulation and landlords who are simultaneously weary and remarkably resilient.
Yet when Sedgwick looks back across those 30-plus years – beginning as a trainee at Bradford & Bingley in 1992 – she doesn’t immediately talk about interest rates or credit cycles. She talks about people.
“I don’t think there’s any one defining moment in my career,” she says. “But there are definitely defining leaders. I’ve had some brilliant ones who supported and challenged me, and I’ve had some very bad ones. You learn just as much from both – you learn who you want to be and absolutely who you don’t.”
Leadership for Sedgwick is not abstract theory. It is personal experience, sometimes painfully earned. She tells a story from the early 2000s that still clearly moves her. After the birth of her daughter Erin – now nearly 20 – Sedgwick suffered severe postnatal depression. Returning to work might easily have ended her career. Instead, it propelled it.
“My line manager at the time was Adrian Scott,” she says. “The support he gave me coming back into work – not only did he back me, I was promoted on my return – was unbelievable. I often think, had you not been there, where would I be? Would I have gone backwards? Would I have left financial services? He changed the course of my career.”
Scott, now chief lender services officer at Connells Group, is still a sounding board. Sedgwick laughs: “I should say Nigel as well,” referring to her current boss, Paragon Banking Group CEO Nigel Terrington.
“I’ve learned so much in the last two and a half years. He’s an incredible leader. But Adrian is the one person who truly shaped me.”
That blend of steel and candour is something Sedgwick is known for in the industry. She is as comfortable talking about APIs and underwriting ratios as she is about mental health and bad bosses. It is what makes her popular with brokers and listened to by policymakers.
BUILDING FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Paragon’s mortgage business has been quietly reinventing itself. Once known, sometimes unflatteringly, as slow, meticulous and unforgiving on documentation, the bank has been determined to shed that perception.
“We had a brilliant reputation as a lender,” Sedgwick says. “But we also had a reputation for being difficult. Brokers would say, ‘Paragon are great, but you’ll be going backwards and forwards for weeks answering questions’.
We had to ask ourselves honestly: “What’s the truth in that perception and what can we change?”
The answer was radical. Paragon decided not to buy an off-the-shelf origination platform as many lenders did (and still do) and instead it built its own.
The result is what Sedgwick talks about with something approaching pride: a largely automated platform pulling in data via 21 APIs and designed specifically for complex buy-to-let.
“The old legacy system, it did the job, but it was clunky,” she says. “Brokers would send half-completed applications, we’d go back with more questions, then more. It was piecemeal underwriting.”
Today, the experience has been transformed.
“Within 10 to 15 minutes a broker can get a real ‘yes’ or a real ‘no’,” she says. “Five minutes more and the application is uploaded and valuation instructed. So within 20 minutes they know where they stand without three weeks of questions.”
Turnaround times have fallen sharply. More important, confidence has risen
Turnaround times have fallen sharply. More important, confidence has risen.
“The certainty is the game-changer,” she says. “Brokers now say: ‘Paragon of old would have messed me about, this Paragon is decisive’.”
The system took 18 months to build and has already gone through 21 upgrades in just 14 months.
“That’s the beauty of having our own transformation team sitting within mortgages,” she says. “Brokers say, ‘I don’t like where that button is’ and we move it. They say, ‘That spreadsheet doesn’t work’ and then we redesign it. If this was a third-party system we’d be in a queue for months.”
She credits her transformation chief, Andy Smart, who now leads the team delivering those constant changes.
“He’s the guy that knows every nut and bolt,” she says. “I can say, ‘I need this proposition live in four weeks’ and it happens.”
A STIRRING MARKET
Paragon’s latest results showed broadly flat new business volumes and Sedgwick is blunt about why.
“Confidence,” she says. “Landlords, especially smaller ones, have had tax changes, interest rate shocks and now the Renters’ Rights Act. A lot of them just said, ‘I’m going to sit on my hands until I know what’s happening’.”
That pause has dominated much of the year. But something has shifted.
“The Budget is done. We now know what’s in the Renters’ Rights Act. Landlords are saying: ‘I’m still here, I’m staying in the market, there’s pent-up demand, I need to get on with it’,” she says. “In the last few weeks we’ve definitely seen activity coming back.”
The Act itself does not alarm her, nor for the portfolio landlords Paragon mainly serves.
“[Landlords] who do this as a profession are incredibly resilient”
“The ones who do this as a profession are incredibly resilient,” she says. “Most are already operating to very high standards. Where my concern lies is the small landlord with one or two properties, high-rate taxpayer, property in personal name, maybe older stock. They are the ones saying ‘enough is enough’.”
And that, she warns, could create a paradox.
“Tenants think they’ll get new protections immediately,” she says. “But in the short term we may see landlords issuing more notices ahead of implementation. The real challenge isn’t the Act – it’s implementation: courts, tribunals, communication. That’s what we’ve talked to government about again and again.”
WHAT MAKES A LANDLORD SUCCEED?
One narrative repeatedly pushed in political debate is that landlords are teetering, unable to cope with rising rates and regulation. But Sedgwick pushes back.
“Arrears remain incredibly low,” she says. “In fact, they have been below residential mortgages for every year in the past 25, bar one. The landlords we see are coping.”
The ones who struggle tend to be the legacy borrowers
The ones who struggle tend to be the legacy borrowers.
“It’s mostly pre-credit-crunch stock,” she says. “Older loans, properties in personal names, borrowers unable to incorporate. That’s where you see pressure but it’s not systemic.”
Limited company structures dominate Paragon’s book at around 90% of lending and Sedgwick expects that trend to only intensify.
“If you’re serious about being a landlord, the economics just push you into limited company borrowing,” she says.
Where are landlords buying today? That, she says, depends on what they value.
“If they’re chasing yield, they go North for HMOs, multi-unit blocks, the Midlands, the North West, North East,” she says. “If they’re looking at long-term capital appreciation, London and the South East still appeal, even if price growth is flatter in the short term.”
And she points to another trend: Scottish investors buying in England.
“We’re seeing more of that middle belt of the country attracting investment from all over the UK,” she says. “Diversification is a big trend.”
A COMPETITIVE EDGE
The big gains from Paragon’s technology overhaul aren’t just speed. They’re cultural.
For years brokers joked about Paragon underwriting with a microscope. Sedgwick wants them to see something different now: a specialist lender that remains rigorous but not obstructive.
“We haven’t lost discipline,” she says. “We’ve lost friction.”
The new platform has cleaned up the pipeline too. Gone are half-completed ‘fag-packet’ applications.
“Brokers were used to us mollycoddling them,” she laughs. “They’d send something half-done and we’d do the rest. Now they input everything upfront. It took some adjustment but the result is fewer dead cases, fewer u-turns, fewer frustrations.”
The bank has also launched a multi-property product and streamlined underwriting for portfolio landlords, decisions that came directly from control over its own systems.
“If we’d relied on third-party software, those propositions simply wouldn’t be live yet,” she says. “Owning the platform gives us agility and that’s everything in specialist lending.”
BEHIND THE SCENES
Sedgwick does not present herself as a corporate archetype. She is direct, often funny, occasionally blunt, a Lancashire pragmatist who has spent her life in major financial institutions without sounding like one.
She remains deeply conscious of the leaders she benefited from and the ones who drove her in the opposite direction.
“I’ve seen bad leadership,” she says. “I’ve been treated harshly. And you learn from that. You say: ‘That is not who I will be’. Being in a senior position means people remember how you made them feel. I never forget that.”
Mentoring matters to her because it once made the difference between leaving and staying. She still leans on her own informal advisers including the men she laughingly says she mustn’t forget to name.
“You can never reach a stage where you don’t need guidance,” she says. “We all need support. We all need someone to say, ‘You’re not seeing this clearly’.”
Her route to leadership wasn’t linear or stage-managed; it was opportunistic, occasionally lucky, always driven by graft.
“I’ve been promoted at times because opportunity appeared,” she says. “But you still have to be ready – you still have to deliver. I’ve worked hard. I’ve also had people who believed in me.”
THE NEXT ACT FOR BUY-TO-LET
So what does she expect next? The answer, as ever with Sedgwick, isn’t sugar-coated.
“The private rented sector won’t collapse,” she says. “It’s too big, too necessary, too deeply embedded. But there will be churn. Smaller landlords will exit, professional landlords will continue to grow. Stock may fall in the short term, that’s the uncomfortable truth.”
What Paragon will do, she says, is continue backing the part of the market that treats property as a long-term business, not a punt.
“Landlords doing this as a profession will adapt,” she says. “They always have. They’re already doing most of what new regulation asks.”
Her focus is clear: continue to deliver for brokers and landlords, make specialist lending simpler, and continue turning a bank once caricatured as slow into one of the most technologically advanced in the sector.
“If brokers say Paragon is easy to deal with then that’s the win,” she says. “Not because we’ve lowered standards but because we’ve removed nonsense.”
32 years after she walked into Bradford & Bingley, Sedgwick remains driven not by algorithms or product sheets, but by human reactions of customers, colleagues and the teams she leads.
“I’ve seen both sides of leadership,” she says. “The inspiring and the damaging. I know exactly which one I want to be.”
