The specialist lending subsidiary of Scarborough Building Society, SSM, was initially launched through selected packagers and key account partners on 9 October. SSM said its relationships with key accounts partners would continue to form the backbone of SSM and packager associations, AMPD and Freehold, would retain exclusividity in their sector.
The wider launch had originally been planned for early 2007.
However, although most of SSM business will continue to be drawn from these key relationships, the Scarborough Group is responding to requests to make its non-conforming products available to all brokers.
Tony Burdin, head of group marketing at Scarborough, said: ‘The extensive market research we carried out in the run up to the launch of SSM was telling us we’d got the formula right. But even so the popularity of SSM has far outstripped anything we dared hope for. The packager associations and key account partners who have been on board with us since launch have been extremely supportive, and are putting a good level of business our way in what are still, really, early days. We will continue to reward their loyalty and support by offering exclusive products and enhanced procuration fees in response to what they tell us their members need.
‘However, the feedback we’re getting is that there is a demand for us to expand into the rest of the marketplace, and so we will now do so earlier than planned. This means that – as with our Core Mortgage Range – all brokers will be able to take advantage of the wide variety of products we have on offer. These have market leading features including highly competitive rates; sensible underwriting criteria; and a bespoke service promise featuring direct access to experienced specialist underwriters.’
Tony added: ‘We deliberately did it this way. As with anything new, we wanted to launch our new subsidiary in a controlled way and give it chance to bed in properly before taking it to the whole of the market. Within its first month, though, SSM has exceeded all our expectations and we are now in a position to roll it out ahead of the New Year deadline we had originally planned.’
