The Newbury Building Society has become the latest lender to join the Equity Release Club’s retirement lending panel.

Members of the Equity Release Club, the distributor for equity release and later life advisers, will now be able to access the Newbury’s range of mortgage products for later life customers including its Retirement Interest Only (RIO) product.

Newbury’s RIO mortgage is a five-year discount, currently available at 3.45% and offered up to 50% LTV. It is available to those borrowers aged 60 or above, retired and in receipt of a pension or other ongoing income.

The RIO can be used for purchasing or remortgaging the client’s residential home and comes with a minimum loan size of £50k (or £40k for existing borrowers transferring into the product). The Newbury lends in both England and Wales and the minimum property value to secure the RIO is £125k.

In addition to its RIO mortgage, Newbury also offers its full residential and buy-to-let mortgage range to persons aged 90 and is able to use a manual underwriting process to look at a wide range of complex situations.

Gary Little (pictured), commercial director at AIR Group, said: “There’s no doubt that the mutual sector continues to embrace the later life lending market, in particular offering RIO products which might be suitable for clients coming to the end of their residential mortgage, and who have the income to continue paying interest into their retirement.

“At the Equity Release Club we want to ensure that all our members have access to the wide range of providers and products that make up the later life market, and adding the Newbury Building Society to our retirement lending panel broadens our offering in this area. Increasingly, we’re seeing growing demand for later life lending, whether that be RIOs or equity release, and it’s highly important that advisers are able to recommend from across the wide range of product options available.

“We are looking forward to working with the Newbury and ensuring its proposition and adviser services connect with our member firms.”

Karen Smith, sales manager at Newbury Building Society, said: “As a mutual building society, we listened to our members and broker contacts who expressed a need for a RIO mortgage and further accessibility to our standard residential mortgage book. People are living for longer and therefore, as a lender, it is our responsibility to ensure we are offering the right products at the right time.

“In addition, we need to ensure we arm our intermediaries with the best possible tools to help them reach their client’s goal. Not only does this include the launch of our RIO product, but also the increase of the upper age lending limit to 90 years old. We look forward to working with the Equity Release Club’s retirement lending panel over the coming months.”