Family Building Society is carving a strong niche in support of intermediaries and the needs of their clients, all focuses on the way that families live today. In this exclusive interview with Family’s Sam Morrison, we explore just some of the reasons why the Society is standing out from the crowd when it comes to delivering innovative, flexible mortgage and savings products – and great service too.
In a crowded mortgage market, where a broker’s choice is abundant and competition fierce, standing out requires more than just competitive rates and attractive products. There is a need to be personal, flexible and accessible when it comes to mortgage solutions in order to deliver the best service possible to brokers and their clients.
Family Building Society has carved a distinctive niche by offering tailored solutions that prioritise flexibility, especially for those in later life. This is all focused around a client-centric approach with the ethos of looking for reasons to accept applicants rather than reasons to reject them. Put simply, it likes to do things differently.
In this exclusive interview with IFA Magazines Digital Editor, Brandon Russell, Sam Morrison, Business Development Manager at Family Building Society, explains what makes the Society and his team so unique, and how their products and services are ideally positioned to help brokers to meet the evolving needs of modern clients.
“Family Building Society has been around since 2014, but our legal entity is actually the National Council Building Society which some of your more experienced readers might remember” said Morrison. “In that sense, we’ve been around for over 125 years. We are traditionally known as a later life lender – particularly amongst intermediaries. We are a very close-knit team; I work closely with our underwriting team, speaking to them daily about cases and getting many cases pre-agreed that way.
“We have a thriving savings business as well. As a mutual, we’re run for the benefit of our members. Our excellent range of savings products complements our mortgage products. We really do try and offer a comprehensive service and at the heart of everything we do is helping families – and the brokers who advise them. Our aim is to be the first choice for families – helping with both their mortgages and savings requirements. We aim to achieve that by offering great products backed up with excellent personal service that makes the seemingly complex a lot simpler for clients.”
Morrison added: “We’ve got a fantastic team here to help our intermediaries and mortgage customers, who all put customer service at the forefront of their work. We’re a manual underwriter so a human being looks at every single case which allows us to be a lot more nuanced when making a final decision. We really are a start-to-finish solution.”
Family Building Society’s focus on personal service, extends through their business development managers (BDMs) too. The team is available nationwide to support brokers with all the issues that can arise during the application process.”
Sam Morrison said: “Since the beginning of the year, we cover the whole of the UK with on-the-ground resources. We are here to support our brokers on a daily basis via phone, arranged meetings or at events and exhibitions. We’re very visible and we pride ourselves on the fact that we are available and happy to discuss cases, carry out affordability assessments, review credit files, etc. and find a way to make a case work. At the end of the day, we’re looking for reasons to lend rather than reasons to not lend and our manual underwriting approach is built around that fact.
“We’re very fortunate to have a team of underwriters that are adaptable as well. I can speak to underwriters a daily basis and get a case agreed before the application even comes in. We don’t credit score, we credit check, which is another example of how we try to be a bit different as we can consider blips in people’s financial history where other companies will not. For example, if an applicant has missed a payment on a mainstream loan or credit card or they’ve had a small CCJ that they’ve satisfied, a mainstream lender would say no. However, we would say, let us take a look and if you can give us a reason why that happened, then we can refer the case to an underwriting manager to consider. That is what our BDMs are here to do, they’re here to try and make a case fit and give the client – and the broker advising them – as many options as possible in order to achieve the best possible outcome.”
A focus on later-life lending
Family Building Society is well-known for later-life lending, offering mortgages to clients up to the age of 95. This is part of their commitment to offering clients as many options as possible well into retirement.
Whether these are interest-only mortgages, buy-to-let mortgages or even offering Joint Borrower Sole Proprietor (JBSP) solutions to help younger family members secure property, the building society is primed to be the go-to solution for family finances in many ways. This is a focus that Sam Morrison aims to continue to build upon as he comments: “Later life lending is a key area of our business and we can lend to clients well into retirement, up to the age of 95 years old. Applicants can apply for an interest-only mortgage at the age of 89 years old and still get a five-year term that’ll take them to age 94. That’s the same for buy-to-lets as well. We accept a wide variety of incomes in retirement, and we can also consider downsizing up to 70% loan-to-value. Our policy is built around supporting clients into retirement but also helping them before they reach retirement through solutions such as Joint Borrower Sole Proprietor. As we offer terms well into retirement, JBSP is a very popular solution with our clients for supporting their offspring to get on the housing ladder for the first time. It can also be used in reverse, allowing their adult children’s income to improve affordability so they can stay in their own home, that they love, during their retirement. When mainstream lenders are saying that borrowers need to pay the mortgage balance at 70, we’re providing options to keep people in their homes for as long as possible.”
“Buy-to-lets are a really strong area for us as well. We can be flexible with criteria around the background portfolio (which we don’t stress test), types of income and a whole host of other measures that have been set up to provide clients with great support and service.
“Finally, what is really key, is our manual underwriting approach. It is so important for us that we look at a case on an individual basis. We’ve got criteria that, in some parts, can be quite flexible. This can allow us to, if the case makes sense, get it accepted by an underwriter and get it through where a mainstream lender may have turned it down at the first opportunity. However, in our case, there are a range of different solutions that we can find that are a bit more bespoke as a manual underwriter. This all feeds back into what I said earlier about looking for reasons to accept rather than reasons to turn applicants away.”
By thinking outside the box, it’s clear that Family Building Society looks at the issues facing people today, providing a different way of doing things, and making a fresh change from the formulaic approaches of some other lenders. Supporting the needs of intermediaries, their clients and their clients’ families and continuing to innovate, is set to remain right at the heart of this mutual society in 2025 and beyond.
About Sam Morrison
Sam is Business Development Manager at the Family Building Society. Working out of their head office in Epsom as their phone-based BDM, Sam has a wealth of knowledge regarding the Society’s processes, criteria and covers a variety of postcodes across the UK.
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