Tony Fullbrook (pictured), policy and regulatory manager at Barclays, revealed the detail of its MCD plans to an audience of brokers at The Mortgage and Protection Event, a Mortgage Solutions roadshow, in Southampton.
On its decision to exceed the prescribed seven-day reflection period, Fullbrook said if the bank received a Certificate of Title from the solicitor within the cooling-off period it would take this as a signal that customer was waiving this right and wanted to proceed.
Barclays said that it was keen to work with brokers to minimise disruption to their business volumes.
It said that while it would check if intermediaries were registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to carry out consumer buy-to-let business it would not decline or hold up cases from those who weren’t. “We will let you know if we don’t think you’re registered and we’ll prompt you to get signed up,” he said. Nationwide’s Ian Andrew has taken a tougher stance on registration by telling brokers it would refuse to deal with them if they had not registered with the regulator.
Fullbrook reassured brokers that they would see little difference with buy to let because Barclays would decide which category the borrower fell into.
“What we don’t want you to do is worry whether your customer is a consumer buy to let or a business buy to let [borrower] and if you are going to treat them differently if it is one or the other,” he said.
The bank will offer the same products, underwriting, service and documents to both sets of customers. A set of questions has been added to the beginning of the of application form to allow Barclays to decide which category the customer falls into.
For pipeline cases, anything offered by the 21 March 2016 will not be captured by the directive and anything offered on or after that date would need to comply with the rules.
“We don’t want to be sending cases back to you so we’ll be looking to keep those cases on a happy path going through to completion,” Fullbrook told brokers.
He said the MCD was not a positive change in the mortgage market. “It is yet another layer of regulation which is not welcome especially as it has a very limited benefit to our customers. I think it negatively affects foreign currency customers as we have seen a number of lenders walking away from this already.”
Barclays has decided to continue offering mortgages in sterling to borrowers with foreign income through its Barclays Wealth brand. Fullbrook said Barclays would accept income in all major currencies and would monitor the exchange rates of these currencies every month so it could issue warnings if there was 20% swing against the exchange rate.
Lloyds Banking Group recently made the decision to stop offering any mortgages to borrowers with income in a foreign currency under all of its lending brands.
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