Gill joins from Landbay, where she was an underwriter for nearly three years. Before that, she spent nearly eight years at Precise as its senior underwriter.
Afin Bank has been designed to cater to Africans living in the UK who struggle to obtain finance because of their visa status or a lack of credit history, and the lender will also target UK residents including high-net-worth professionals and the self-employed.
Simrat said the opportunity to work with customers who were typically poorly served appealed to her.
She said: “The opportunity struck me as truly unique. I appreciate that we will be focusing on borrowers who are not specifically served by the mainstream market and that our goal is to make customers feel like individuals, rather than just numbers.”
The lender plans to use technology to deliver a fast and efficient service, but its underwriting process will mostly be manual due to the usually complex nature of its target borrowers.
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Simrat said: “It is actually refreshing to take on a role that involves more manual underwriting, rather than being fully automated. With our approach, we can review factors, such as visa status, credit and income, that other lenders would probably reject as a risk because they can’t validate them using a completely automated approach.”
Simrat will be based at Afin Bank’s new Centre of Excellence in Birmingham, which will be home to its core functions such as credit and underwriting and customer service.
Swaraj Dada, head of credit at Afin Bank, said: “Simrat brings a lot of experience of the specialist mortgage sector, but her knowledge and passion for manual underwriting brings an extra dimension. Afin Bank’s aim is to make getting a mortgage as effortless as possible, so Simrat’s expertise will help us develop an underwriting approach that puts the customer first, while still being efficient and reliable.”
Afin Bank is backed by African reinsurer WAICA Re, which has committed £62m to setting up the bank, and obtained its banking licence Authorisation with Restrictions (AwR) in October last year.
It will offer residential and buy-to-let (BTL) mortgages next year for borrowers in the UK as well as BTL borrowers in certain African countries, alongside an FSCS-protected savings proposition.
