In joining the Morpheus team, Gerald (pictured above) plans to utilise his decades of experience in financial services, gathered from time spent at Together and GE Capital, as well as a non-executive role at the FCA. Gerald is now taking this arsenal of knowledge to Morpheus, a young firm established in May last year.

Describing his role at the lender, Gerald said it was “to help Morpheus really establish itself as a credible innovative player in [the] specialist lending market”.

To help Morpheus grow, Gerald will be using a three-pillar strategy, with the first of these being funding resilience.

“Funding resilience is huge. Certainly, a lesson learned from previous cycles and previous businesses is that having a broad base of capital means we can grow with confidence; we can take on scale knowing that we can fund it,” he said.

“And it also rewards our capital partners, if you like — or at least proves to them that we are capable of producing high-quality scale receivables.”

The second pillar involves using tech innovation, manifested around new products over time, to differentiate services and ensure the firm is as useful as possible to brokers.

The final pillar — and Gerald’s favourite — is operational discipline.

“It is about governance, but it's also about risk management and compliance, to make sure that we embed that safety and rigour into the business early on.”

The lender eventually plans to branch out from bridging, an area that Gerald sees as a good testing ground for tech. Going forward, he plans to help Morpheus utilise tech in order to combine products — for example, allowing bridging customers to transfer over to BTL finance, thereby allowing the firm to take the customer through the whole journey.

Gerald was drawn to the firm in part because of its status as a new lender eager to embrace more technology.

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“It's a very young lender, which is obviously a stimulating environment to be in, but I think it's really about the technology that can transform the customer and broker experience, which I've not seen before,” he explained.

“You need to be agile and you need to be totally innovative, because it's a competitive market… and I think Morpheus is both of those things.”

Commenting on the move from a more established player like Together, Gerald noted that while Morpheus may not have the brand power of larger competitors, it could be more open to exploring the use of tech; larger firms were often more nervous about modernisation because of the pressure to deliver quarterly results.

Lower operational costs could also help smaller lenders gain a nimble edge, according to Gerald — particularly with falling rates putting pressure on margins and increasing competition. His view is that employing tech could reduce operational cost ratios for new companies, while larger lenders remain more dependent on personnel.

However, one challenge Gerald highlighted was what he called “the Amazon effect”, where there was an expectation of getting things delivered to the door as quickly as possible.

“It’s like, ‘who can do it quickest?’ And it's not always about the cheapest price, it's about who's going to help me,” he stated.

“Part of my role and part of the challenge is ensuring you don't sacrifice quality for speed, [and] you don't miss out key elements of the process and end up with a poorly performing book.

“It's about providing speed and consistency for customers, whoever they might be, [and] maintaining that credit quality and governance. Because if you don't, then your partners will lose faith very quickly and your business disappears.”

While getting the long-term strategy in place, Gerald plans to apply his skills and extensive expertise to help Morpheus use tech and agility to make its mark on the industry.

“My plan is to take the experience and governance of running a business — like Together and all the other larger businesses that I've worked with — and try to overlay those standards on this business very early on without squeezing the life out of it.”