In November 2021, Jon joined the business — which currently consists of almost 1900 people, including circa 90 in its sales team — with a mission to regularly reveal new products, enhance service, develop its technology, and improve the customer and broker experience.

One of Jon’s “four pillars” over the past eight months has been around ensuring all lending brands within the group work and blend well together.

To do this, the group combined Precise Mortgages’ and Kent Reliance’s BDM teams to offer intermediaries support through multiple communication strategies, and both InterBay and Precise introduced an extensive and dual-branded selection of bridging products to utilise the expertise across both arms.

OSB also launched a regular stream of products across all divisions throughout the first half of the year, starting with InterBay’s new semi-commercial and commercial finance range.

Since then, the group refreshed Kent Reliance’s entire BTL offering and created a HNW team that recently started assisting brokers with complex and large-scale bridging finance deals. “This is the area I'm most pleased with; all of our lending brands are performing above expectations in terms of application flow,” Jon said.

“We're back to the level of lending criteria that we had pre-pandemic.”

Consequently, Jon’s aim to increase Precise’s level of bridging lending over the course of 2022 to more than what it it had been during the previous two years, has come to fruition.

According to OSB’s financial data for the first half of this year, the company saw significant jumps in its bridging and commercial originations.

Its gross bridging book now stands at £83.8m, while its commercial loan book has hit £789.5m.

In bridging, the group originated £77m of business during the first six months of the year, a 14% rise on the same period in 2021, and InterBay’s commercial organic originations grew to £72m — up from £20.3m in the same period in 2021, with a strong pipeline of applications to complete in the second half of 2022.

When asked how Precise has managed to attract more market share in the increasingly competitive bridging space, Jon pointed to having a desirable product set.

“Precise has always had one of the most attractive regulated bridging offerings; being able to deal with regulated and unregulated within Precise and InterBay has been very helpful,” he explained.

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While H1 2022 saw OSB roll out service enhancements and a series of product changes across bridging, commercial and BTL, the current climbing nature of interest rates has meant replacing innovation with a more structured and predictable flow of product withdrawal and replacements.

“I don't think anybody really anticipated the level of acceleration in terms of interest rate changes,” Jon admitted.

He noted that current market expectations see interest rates rising to 3% by the end of this year.

Consequently, innovation and new offerings from lenders may take a back seat; it will simply be maintaining the range of products that are still left on the shelf. “You've got to be consistent and allow a degree of predictability with your borrowers and intermediaries,” Jon commented.

“In a way, being a bit boring in the second half of the year would be a good thing, relative to some of the uncertainty we're facing.”

Jon claimed that as a deposit-backed bank, OSB offers a degree of consistency and sustainable pricing, presence and predictability — something brokers are currently looking for.

Since interest rates started to rise, the lender has been giving intermediaries a minimum of 24 hours to warn them when changes are being implemented.

“I’m really proud of the team,” Jon added, “they've transitioned from being very creative in terms of new propositions and widening the lending suite to being very consistent about how we give notice in terms of product withdrawals.”

Another key area for Jon by the end of this year is to retain a significant number of OSB’s customers during a time when many of them will be coming off their previous fixed-term rates — particularly in BTL.

To achieve this, OSB will be welcoming over 30 new people to its servicing team this year, and plans to invest in technology so that borrowers and brokers of Precise’s BTL and residential products have the ability to self-serve their product choices in the future.

“Our services are quite manual . . . it's important to make that process slick,” Jon emphasised.

The company will also be updating the Precise website to improve broker experience during H1 2023.

Earlier in the year, OSB revealed plans to cut all emissions made through the group’s operating footprint by 2030, and has some exciting developments in the pipeline with regard to green finance options.

At the end of July, Precise unveiled a green refurbishment BTL range for clients wanting to improve the energy efficiency of their properties, and Jon hinted this would be the first product in a series of new developments of this kind, especially in the second half of this year and into 2023.

“Next year, quite a lot of activity will feed through in terms of how we underwrite, what products we launch, and what services and access to information we offer as well."