Travelling one-hundred-and-ten miles in 90-degree heat, climbing 18,000 feet – it sounds like a situation most of us would indulge in from the comfort of our own homes while watching Sky Sports. But, for Bill Safran, it is just another day out of the office as Trigold’s chief executive overcame all of these in one day when he climbed the Alpe d’Huez in a cycle race with 3800 other entrants.
And from investment banking in New York to running one of the main technology platforms for mortgage intermediaries in London, he is clearly a man who loves a challenge in his professional life too.
“I am a great believer in Kaizen,” he says. “It is a Japanese principle about constant improvements made with little jumps and this is exactly what Trigold is about. All of our improvements over the last few years have been made by adding a service, getting it out there and then refining it once it is in the market, following feedback from our customers.
“Just look at our enhanced non-conforming module. It made it just as easy to source a sub-prime mortgage as a prime one, but we are adding to it all the time. We announced Outlook integration within the last year and earlier this year we integrated our platform with protection provider Select & Protect. It is all about making subtle refinements on a constant basis.”
The Trigold integration with Select & Protect offers its users an extra cross-sale opportunity at the touch of a button and the ability to conduct business off as well as online. “It makes writing cover much less time-consuming and more integrated with the mortgage sales process. The functionality is part of our standard software and can be enabled in branded versions on request,” he says.
New York stories
Safran was made chief executive of Trigold last year, but where did his career start?
“My first job out of college was investment banking for a firm called Drexel Burnham and my focus was real estate finance. Living down in the village in New York, which is a reasonably fashionable area, probably like Notting Hill, was great fun. I was there for three years. After that I went to business school in Wharton to study for an MBA.
“My folks moved to London in 1972 and it was always my intention to come back here, having spent part of my childhood here. I moved back in 1995 and worked for a fund management firm that specialised in strategic investments called Arlington Capital. I was there for three years, then I worked for a purchasing finance group called Nomura. There I presided over a number of pub acquisitions, including one of the largest pub estates in the UK – Courage.”
Safran is clearly a hard-working man, yet he has managed to maintain his easy going persona. The Ivy League chinos and deck shoes ethos seems to pervade the whole organisation and, on a tour of the office, he surveys his ranks of employees, who all seem to be in good spirits.
“People should be responsible to the people paying the salaries and that is our clients,” he says. “I have tried to instil a hard-working ethos here at Trigold but I like people to come and work here and feel relaxed. It is a very US way of doing things I guess, but then some of our sales guys insist on wearing a suit and tie every day. But that is what they feel comfortable wearing at work. However, the casual thing we have also helps build the image that we are not a financial company.”
It was during the advent of the internet that Safran first started to look at opportunities in the electronic sector and joined the firm IFonline – the precursor to Trigold.
“The internet had just started gaining media attention and it seemed to be one of the most vibrant areas where you could work. It was in the heady days before the dot.com bubble had burst and the industry seemed to be full of opportunities to make money. We all thought within a few years it would change everyone’s working lives beyond all recognition. In retrospect it was obviously wishful thinking on our part.
“IFonline, which was committed to an entirely online approach to working with its customers, eventually merged with a company called Trigold, which was committed to a more off-line approach. This was what most brokers wanted but we were so excited by the whole internet thing and the possibilities that it presented that we failed to take on board what our customers – the intermediaries – actually wanted. But we learned our lesson – the customer always comes first. With Trigold, advisers do an online update in the morning and there is no need to stay linked up all day, which makes sense. But then the market is a lot smarter than any individual is.”
Safran admits he has “up days and down days”, but says he always looks forward to going into the office. “Especially when I see the progress we are making”, he says. “We had 7000 customers two years ago and now we have closer to 24,000.”
Last October Safran had a telling reminder of how far the firm has come in the last few years when the firm reached seventeenth place in a Sunday Times poll of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies between 2002 and 2004. The Tech-track 100 poll said Trigold had seen sales grow 143% a year, from £685,000 in 2002 to £4m in 2004.
“We were shocked to finish so high up. The poll is based on sales growth and it shows how well we have been doing in the last few years. The service we have been providing is comprehensive, flexible and easy to use. We know that if we continue to provide a quality service we will continue to go up the list, but it is important not to rest on our laurels and keep up the good work.”
Another major coup for Trigold was when BM Solutions joined its specialist sub-prime enhanced non-conforming (ENC) platform. The announcement represented a dramatic turnaround for the HBOS subsidiary. The Trigold ENC is heavily backed by Abbey, whereas HBOS is one of the primary backers of rival technology platform, Mortgage Brain.
Safran says: “It was definitely a milestone for us to get the recognition from BM Solutions that it needed to join ENC. BM Solutions is one of the major forces in the non-conforming market and is known for its intermediary focus and innovation in product design. To get it on board was definitely a major coup – especially given the harsh criticism we had from some of its senior management at the time.”
But Safran does not hold on to criticism for long and when things start to get him down he likes to take to the road.
“I started cycling about three years ago – a friend introduced me to it and I have been hooked ever since”, he says. “I think the best thing about it is that you are travelling at the perfect speed. Walking is too slow and driving is too fast. You can cover a lot of ground in one day, get to look around a lot of places and stop off at all the various pubs and so on. You can go out for a 60-mile ride and the time passes really quickly – it is almost meditative. But then you can push it further and it becomes really challenging.
“In the ride up the Alpe D’Huez, it was a baking hot day, the tarmac was melting, and we went over four of these big mountains in France. It was unbelievably gruelling, but I was spurred on by people saying to me before the race that I would never do it. After 110 miles in one day, I knew I never wanted to do it again.”
Common standards
There have been calls in the industry for a common electronic trading platform for a long time. For the moment though, Trigold and Mortgage Brain are still locked in a format war.
Even 10 years ago, people would have thought anyone taking on the might of the Mortgage Brain platform was committing a grave folly. But, to borrow the Hollywood vernacular, it only takes one man with the courage to make a difference and, at a time when there is an epic struggle between sourcing systems, Safran hopes it his vision and hard work that will ultimately count.
What is certain is that the rivalry between Trigold and Mortgage Brain has accelerated the development of both systems and changed the way intermediaries work during the last decade. It is also certain it will continue to do so as the UK market looks for new ways to save time, cut costs and reduce paperwork.
