The past 12 months or so have been anything but dull at Chetwood Bank. In May 2024, we announced that we’d acquired CHL Mortgages for Intermediaries, while at the same time we were putting the finishing touches to ModaMortgages, the new lender we’d been developing in-house and launched to market at the start of this year.
For several months, CHL Mortgages for Intermediaries and ModaMortgages co-existed under the Chetwood Bank roof.
Both the specialist buy-to-let lenders were able to leverage the incredibly strong financial foundations the bank offered, not to mention a stellar senior leadership team and board.
But then, in June, we made a notable change: we aligned the two lenders more closely, forming a unified team of business development managers (BDMs) that could work across both brands. Three months on, the benefits – and the key learnings – of this integration are becoming clear.
TWO BRANDS, ONE MISSION
ModaMortgages and CHL Mortgages for Intermediaries each have their own identity, proposition and product set.
The home of ‘smarter, faster, simpler’ buy-to-let mortgages, ModaMortgages is known for its fresh take on buy-to-let, focusing on the broker experience by ensuring a frictionless application and delivery model by using modern systems. It embodies the Chetwood Bank’s broader ethos of delivering ‘no nonsense banking’.
CHL Mortgages for Intermediaries, as a brand that’s been in the specialist lender space for over two decades, has a long-established reputation in the market for handling more complicated cases.
Rather than merging the brands outright, we’ve always been clear that we want to maintain their distinct identities and qualities.
But we also realised that to maximise efficiency and make lives easier for brokers, bringing their distribution efforts together was the best way to go.
This means one team of BDMs now represents both lenders simultaneously. For brokers, that translates to a single point of contact with twice the potential solutions.
MORE CHANCES TO SAY YES
The most immediate benefit for intermediaries has been the broadened reach of the BDMs.
With two lenders in their toolkit, each BDM can now offer a wider range of criteria and products. Where one lender may not fit a case, the other often can.
That dual perspective has created more opportunities to get applications over the line. In an increasingly complex buy-to-let landscape – where portfolio landlords, limited companies and specialist structures are commonplace – this flexibility is invaluable.
Quite simply, our BDMs now have twice the chance of saying ‘yes’ to a broker.
But that’s not to say the process hasn’t also been a learning curve for the newly merged sales and distribution team.
ENHANCEMENT, NOT DILUTION
Every lender has its own systems, processes and culture, and it takes time to align those ways of working. For our BDMs, that’s required them to get fully up to speed on two sets of criteria, two product ranges and two brand stories.
Brokers, too, have had to adjust to the new model. CHL Mortgages for Intermediaries and ModaMortgages are distinct in their values, proposition and branding – we’ve needed to support and educate brokers about the fact that both exist as part of Chetwood Bank, and that there’s now a unified sales team they can work with to access both lenders with a single point of contact.
Naturally, we’ve spent the past three months underlining the point that this about enhancement, not dilution.
For the BDMs themselves, the change has been energising. Many see it as an opportunity to broaden their expertise and add more value in every broker conversation. In fact, it’s quite strange to think we only made the change three or four months ago – the combined team found its rhythm quickly, with stronger collaboration and shared best practice emerging across the board.
LOOKING AHEAD
The decision to acquire one specialist lender while developing another might have raised eyebrows.
However, by unifying the two sales team forces to create one dual-branded team, we can now offer brokers and their clients with even more options.
It’s a win-win for everyone: brokers benefit from a bigger toolbox, BDMs gain a stronger, louder voice, and Chetwood Bank cements its place as a modern, flexible force in the buy-to-let sector.
