"The big institutions don't have hundreds of good underwriters and we have a real shortage of talent."
The conference, held in partnership with Financial Reporter, was held digitally for the first time due to social distancing requirements, and featured a variety of speakers from across the short term lending sector.
Speakers included McDowell, whose session explored the outlook from the perspective of a bridging lender; senior Savills analyst Lawrence Bowles; and Association of Mortgage Intermediaries chief Robert Sinclair. Sinclair then joined the panel debate to close the session, speaking alongside Miranda Khadr of Yellowstone Finance, Ray Cohen of Jackson Cohen, and Financial Reporter editor Rozi Jones, chaired by Alex Hammond of Also Communications.
Discussing talent in the short-term lending industry, McDowell said there are not enough people in the industry, adding that “of course we have excellent people, but we have a shortage of true talent, particularly in underwriting where it’s most important”.
Charles said: "At HTB, I am lucky enough to be blessed with great team of underwriters. But it has been hard to get that team together. Particularly when it comes to finding the strong readymade people."
Going back ten years, McDowell said there was probably “10, 12, 14 institutions on the high street who had factories full of underwriters and every year they’d add hundreds or thousands of school leavers, graduates and people with no lending experience and train them”.
He added: “They understood transactions, credit risk, property risk, legal risk, and once they had the basics they would move round the industry and the specialist lenders could mould them into the expert specialist underwriters we know and love across the industry. But those factories don’t exist any more. The big institutions don't have hundreds of good underwriters and we have a real shortage of talent. We, as a short-term lending industry need to look at nurturing and training and creating underwriters and particularly specialist lending underwriters from scratch if we want to continue.”
When asked if the sector was historically good at nurturing people, he said no, explaining: “The specialist lending market has never been very good at training and developing people. We give fantastic opportunities and if someone’s able to take that opportunity they can have an incredible career and really develop and grow, but it hasn’t historically nurtured people.”
Charles agreed that small organisations, focused on growth revenue and managing costs, “can't afford to nurture or pull along dead wood”, adding that the industry remains a “cut throat world”.
