This month, we are sitting down with Rob Gill (pictured), managing director of Altura Mortgage Finance.
How did you get into the mortgage industry?
A chance conversation in a Pret just off Oxford Circus. Before I worked in mortgages, I spent 10 years in investment banking. I was a trader for the last 6-7 years, and in my early 30s, decided a trading floor wasn’t somewhere I still wanted to be in my early 40s.
I owned a buy-to-let (BTL) property and met with my mortgage broker in Pret one afternoon, and in our discussions mentioned I was considering a career change. He suggested that “mortgage broking isn’t a bad place to be”. With my background in finance and interest in property, I decided he might well be right.
I secured a couple of interviews through some other contacts I had in mortgage broking, took the CeMAP, and in late 2006, started work at a large mortgage broker firm in Knightsbridge. An amazing time and place to learn the trade.
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What has been the biggest learning over your career?
This can be summed up by my favourite business quote of all time by that well-known philosopher, Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.
Your career will not be a straight line; your business plans will be ripped up and rewritten more times than you can keep up with. I started my investment banking career as a temp and worked my way up to the trading floor. I got into mortgages over a coffee. I started my first business after the broker I worked for went bust. I developed our current business model when the pandemic ripped up the plan and forced us all to work from home. It’s absolutely crucial to adapt, stay flexible, and roll with the punches.
Altura Finance covers a wide range of business. Have there been any particular hotspots or trends that you have seen in the past year? What have the challenges been?
As much as we can complicate it, ultimately, our business is fairly simple: when interest rates fall, people borrow money. As we used to say in trading, “the trend is your friend”, so on that basis alone, it’s been a really good last year or so in almost all sectors. We’ve seen more demand for bridging and second charges in particular, though, where lower interest rates make them more attractive and viable.
The challenge across all sectors remains the length of time it takes to get deals completed. From residential remortgages through to complex specialist, the legal process seems ever more protracted. The industry and economy as whole urgently need a solution and we’re very supportive of various initiatives being discussed by the industry and the government.
Looking ahead for the specialist lending sector, where do you think the biggest opportunities and challenges are?
The challenge is the bureaucracy and process required to get deals completed. The significant opportunity is to use modern processes and technology to reverse this trend and reduce the time taken to complete a deal.
Altura Finance launched a standalone specialist finance advice brand in 2023. How is the business going and what are the plans for the future?
The brand helped us consolidate in the specialist arena and forge key partnerships with lenders and introducers under our head of specialist and commercial, Guy Nyirenda. Guy’s as respected as anyone in the sector, it was his vision that specialist lending requires a separate brand and identity and he’s used it to great effect.
From this now established base, we’re looking to grow the brand by recruiting specialist advisers to work alongside Guy, promote the brand, and grow their client banks to help both them and the company to be successful.
What is the current headcount of the business and are there plans for further recruitment?
The network as a whole comprises 21 advisers, two further management and two administrators within our appointed representatives (ARs) (it wasn’t easy arranging the Christmas party this year!).
Our goal for 2026 is to reach 40-plus advisers, largely by helping our existing ARs grow and recruiting the right type of new AR firm to join the network, as well as recruiting 2-3 advisers to work under Altura Specialist Finance.
Altura Finance recently launched a mortgage network. What has the reception been like and can you talk us through the decision behind the launch? Do you have an ideal number of firms in mind?
We’ve had a great reaction to our launch, it definitely seems to have made an impression, given the feedback we’ve received during this ‘events season’. Even more pleasing than the external reaction has been that from our existing ARs, who’ve provided quotes and testimonials as part of the launch. Their support means a huge amount, and they can describe what we really offer much better than we can.
We’ve been quietly building a network for a few years now, so the reason for the launch was to let people know what we’re doing. As a management team, we’ve realised that helping other people and their business grow is our real passion. Taking a great adviser and turning them into a brilliant business person, passing on what we’ve learned from launching and growing successful businesses of our own, gives us a huge buzz and we want to keep on doing it.
Do you think more brokers will have to diversify into specialist lending? What advice would you give to brokers who want to explore the specialist lending sector if they haven’t done so before?
There’s an advert on the tube at the moment that shows an artificial intelligence (AI) bot being asked to bend a pipe. The AI replies it can’t do that, and the ad then suggests AI won’t be able to do such things for some time, so the way to a future-proof career is to train as a plumber.
I’d paraphrase by asking AI to place a £1m bridge on a multi-unit freehold block (MUFB) to be purchased at auction by a property investor in Hong Kong. Knowing ChatGPT, it might well give it a go, but I think we all know that it can’t do that and won’t be able to for a while.
The rise of AI might well take a chunk out of the vanilla mortgage market, allowing clients to seamlessly source and place their own remortgage or straightforward purchase, and possibly even get ‘advice’ of some sort too.
Specialist finance, however – in which I’d include complex offerings such as self-employed, large loans, expats, etc – seems set to stay the preserve of the human adviser for a lot longer. Brokers need to future-proof their businesses by upskilling into complex and/or specialist, joining firms or networks that’ll give them the support and flexibility to learn and then write such business.
What would you want the mortgage industry to know about Altura Finance?
That we are a network. We have three core parts to our offering: community, opportunity and support. Our advisers have clear, regular access to the management team and, perhaps more importantly, each other to learn and get advice from.
Our wide-ranging lending panel and experience in complex and specialist lending provides opportunities to learn, expand and ultimately write more business. The support we offer covers setting up and running a successful business, whether that be as a one-adviser firm or multiple advisers looking to grow. It genuinely is our passion to take on advisers to help them succeed and fulfil their ambitions.
