The society is in the early stages of putting together a development strategy which it said had been delayed until now because of the regulatory demands which the lender was forced to prioritise.
Speaking to audience of intermediaries at its MCD roadshow, Tim Gunning, intermediary development manager, said development of the strategy was underway and hoped that a pilot would begin before the end of the year.
He said: “Some 97% of our business comes through brokers so why wouldn’t we pay you to do product transfers. We couldn’t because our system wouldn’t allow us to do it, we’ve looked at various ways. We are running a pilot this year and once that is successful we will be rolling that out to everybody.”
A spokesperson for Skipton said that given the retention strategy was in the ‘conceptual stage’ it was not yet possible to name the pilot partners or to give a firm date when it would begin.
Paul Darwin (pictured), head of intermediary sales at Skipton, said he understood that within the broker community retention was a key part of their business.
The proc fee for retention business debate was raised by Jeremy Duncombe, director of Legal & General Mortgage Club, at the The Mortgage and Protection Event, a Mortgage Solutions roadshow, when he grilled lender panellists about their failure to implement retention reward strategies.
Duncombe said he failed to understand why lenders were not paying brokers if, after a full advice process, the best deal for the borrower was to remain with the same lender.
Coventry Building Society’s corporate relationship manager Jonathan Stinton and Mark Collar, national intermediary development manager at Leeds Building Society both said they had no immediate plans to start paying retention proc fees but it was a topic high on the agenda.
Nationwide has confirmed it had no plans to consider a retention reward strategy at this time.
