Glasgow-based Opus is confident the move will add greater value to the relationship it enjoys with intermediary and lender partners alike. As Lockhart Bruce, finance and marketing director of Opus, explains: “Greater emphasis is being placed on companies like Opus to deliver added value to lenders and intermediaries alike. This means that we have to be able to distribute greater volumes of residential mortgages on behalf of our lenders while, at the same time, offer our brokers and IFAs greater levels of support.
“Operating in the packaging world, as we did, would not allow us to meet these challenges. Therefore we have chosen to become a product design, processing and administration centre, dealing in an exclusive range of specialist products that we design and underwrite in-house in addition to the products offered via our lenders panel.”
As part of its restructuring exercise, Opus has revised the level of procuration fee it now pays to its growing army intermediaries. The company believes this change, coupled with a greater capability to write the kind of products intermediaries and their clients want, will enable it to write over £1 billion of business by the end of 2004. Opus is currently on course to originate £500 million of specialist mortgages by the end of 2003.
“Because we operate in a volume-related business, we get the advantages of economies of scale. Therefore we are now able to offer more to our intermediaries and their clients,” added Lockhart Bruce. “On all our deals, we will be levying an administration charge of just .25 per cent – regardless of the standard scale of fee we receive from our lender partners. That’s a great deal for intermediaries.
“These means our introducers will have the financial power to offer greater help to their clients in the long-term, whether it be through cash-back schemes, or through financial assistance with legal fees or valuations. The truth is that everyone who deals with Opus will win.”
