Tuesday Blabber
There’s always more news on Tuesdays than Mondays. I don’t know if anyone else is like me, but I actually prefer days when there’s a bit of something to digest and think about, not just about boring old loans and stuff, but about anything.
Today there’s been a couple of pieces of news coming out of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). I find it interesting that they’ve formed a new task force called the Payment Systems Task Force. This is in tandem with the establishment of a new governance body for payment systems, the Payments Industry Association. This follows a recommendation from the OFT to the Treasury and I presume is to get consistency in how Banks and other finance bodies clear cheques and the timing from which they pay interest. There’s a press release about it on the OFT site.
At the same time (well yesterday actually) the OFT announced the appointment of Jonathan May to the post of Executive Director of Policy and Strategy. Both of these articles are quite interesting given the OFT announced its reorganisation a short time ago.
Following yesterday’s news about Money Partners et al, it’s interesting they’ve now announced plans to go direct to broker. They’ve announced a new channel brand called Money Partners Touch, which will be dedicated to non-packaging brokers, introducers and IFAs.
Operating out of Residential 1’s Bromley offices, it will provide introducers and advisers with processing and packaging services, electronic decisions, online case management and direct access to Money Partners’ full range of specialist mortgage products
The Residential 1 brand survives as a wholly-owned secured loans broker subsidiary of Money Partners. Interestingly, it will operate with a separate management and staff, and will continue to offer secured loans from a panel of providers - perhaps the acquisition was just to exploit a new channel or maybe they don’t want to rock the Residential 1 boat too soon, although they also say there will be no redundancies.
Colin Sanders, Money Partners’ chief executive officer, said: “The next phase in our development is to take the Money Partners proposition to the wider, non-packaging introducer community. We’re not the first to do this and I won’t try to gloss it up as a ‘next generation’ offering. What we will do is keep it simple and straightforward because we want introducers to have access to our products in a way that works for them and their clients.”
So the bottom line is introducers can now go direct to Money Partners.
