Wyles, speaking to an audience of mortgage professionals at the CML innovation conference, said that any new products tended to be met with great scepticism by networks.
“Generally speaking there is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in the intermediary market and we [Castle Trust] are getting traction with intermediaries,” he said.
“But let me tell you that the networks, the AR networks in particular, who run very thin capital bases and take huge amounts of regulatory risk are today like a bunch of frightened children in a forest.
“They think there’s a monster behind every tree and I’m afraid we’re back again to that brake on innovation called regulation.”
Wyles later highlighted the self-employed and those with complex income as two segments of the market that were being forgotten about due to the weight of regulation in the market.
“The only way that we are going to crack this for those customers is to innovate, but we will have to do it within the envelope of what the regulators permit. That is quite a challenge.”
