With JP Morgan providing a £200m senior secured facility, the first securitisation in MSP’s history, and Pollen Street Capital investing an additional £150m, B&C spoke with MSP’s finance director, Nicky Hollamby, about what the funding could mean for the firm’s bridging proposition.

“We are predominantly known as a development funder, just purely because of our expertise in that area, but we really want to expand our bridge offering,” said Nicky.

“And we want these funding lines to enable us to offer more flexible products for people and actually create a compelling product offering for our customers.”

As part of the finance provider’s product enhancement, Nicky said MSP was improving its existing development exit offering, with research on this taking place over the next few months.

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The business is also hoping that the new funding will allow it to grow its loan book over the coming years: “We have set a five-year growth target of achieving a £750m loan book by 2030. The new funding lines are important to achieving this while enhancing the stability, flexibility, and diversity of our lending.”

With these growth plans comes a blueprint for an increase in originations and eventually taking on a further £350m from JP Morgan. To do this, Nicky explained that the lender plans to develop and invest more into broker relationships in order to expand further into the adviser market.

“Being relationship driven, I think that's really important for us to work on those relationships to enable us to increase our originations. Increasing our originations in turn will mean that we can then draw on that facility with JP Morgan in the future,” she stated.

MSP also plans to increase its headcount, which currently stands at 50. The business is particularly focused on expanding its BDM team, which deal in both bridging and development. Already, the firm has begun making appointments with its future goals in mind, not least with new CEO Leigh Bartlett, brought onboard in a bid to make progress, including through utilising his experiences in gaining the recent funding lines.

“We felt for succession planning it was important to get someone like Leigh on board and that he would be a real value add to the business, having worked in some larger players previously, and can help us on that growth journey over the next few years,” Nicky highlighted.

“For us, it's been a really exciting past few months.”