West Bromwich Building Society is finalising plans to launch an intermediary-facing subsidiary brand in the autumn.
The subsidiary will be called ‘New World’ ‘ the brand it acquired last year from the Commonwealth Bank of Aus-tralia when the Antipodean lender left the UK market.
New World will form part of the West Bromwich Mortgage Company, a subsidiary company set up in 1995 to acquire mortgage portfolios. When the Society acquired the brand name last year, it also acquired a £100m mortgage portfolio, and the subsidiary now has over £400m in assets on its balance sheet. It intends to develop its offering to intermediaries and offer more keenly-priced products.
Gary Cowdrill, finance director at West Bromwich BS, said: ‘We started work on this a few months ago, but it will not be ready for the spring rush, so we will wait until autumn to launch. It will offer similar products as West Brom ‘ prime residential ‘ but there will also be some flexible and some self-certification products. The difference is that it will not confer membership rights on borrowers and will be more tailored towards intermediaries, so will have finer pricing.’
It is the intention of the Building Society that loans signed to New World will be securitised, to remove them from West Bromwich’s balance sheet.
