We Introduce You

Advantage has launched a new version of its equity share mortgage specifically targeted at people in the police force.

Police officers only need to have completed six months of their probationary period to qualify and the mortgage is available to both people with existing mortgages as well as people starting on the property ladder. Advantage have also made the mortgage available to people who want to relocate.

The main difference between the standard Flexishare product and that designed for the Police Service is that on both the conventional mortgage and residential ownership loan parts of the financial arrangement there is tailored interest rates.

As with the standard Flexishare product the amount you can borrow is based on an affordability model and not income multiples.

Borrowers are asked to pay an initial 5% deposit and the applicant can then borrow between 15.1% and 80% of its value through the conventional mortgage part of the Police Service Flexishare plan.

The residential ownership loan incorporated in the product will cover between 15% and 35% of the property value and repayments for this have been set at 2.99% for the entire term of the loan.

Topping up the conventional mortgage and residential ownership loan is the equity loan funded by Advantage, which will share in any future increase or decrease in the property value - in the same proportion as the share borrowed in the residential ownership loan.

Advantage has been hammering out the terms of the new mortgage with Police Federation Mortgages. Although this name sounds like it is in some way directly connected to the Police force it is actually a Mortgage Introducer that has been approved by the Police authorities.

It seems strange that the Police Federation Mortgages website still proudly states to be part of the listed Millfield group, when that group went into receivership in June. The Money Portal PLC purchased the mortgage introducer in the same month.

Following on from the post about the FSA saying to treat customers fairly (TCF), the FSA has now updated its website with a new section targeted at small businesses.

Recognising the fact that there tends to be a lack of resources in small businesses, the FSA says that rather than having formalised documents etc. small firms should take a step back and look at its operations, identify areas of risk to its customers, and consider how to remove or mitigate them.

Although not updated since last year, the new section of the website contains a PDF document which outlines the FSA’s ideas on TCF for small firms.

The subjects covered include financial promotions, advice and sales process, training, accurate and timely record keeping, disputes and complaint handling, flow of information and risk assessment.

In the next few months the FSA will be conducting a telephone survey to 900 small businesses about TCF and at some stage next year will be visiting a sample of the firms who answered the survey questions. In April 2007 the FSA will publish a review on the number of companies who have or haven’t met the March deadline for implementing a TCF policy.

A story I find quite interesting today is one that the Daily Mail owned website thisismoney has signed a deal with paaleads to sell its leads.

Paaleads is owned by moneysupermarket and is basically an Ebay style system where people in the financial world can bid for leads generated by other sites.

So in this case, people go onto the thisismoney website and log their interest, in say a mortgage, the lead is then passed to the paaleads site where it is put up for auction and the highest bidder gets the lead.

This sort of system is not unique and there are several other buying and selling networks for affiliates, but perhaps paaleads will become the largest one. The site also has a similar deal with its parent company Moneysupermarket as well as Moneyweb, Yourmortgage and Mymortgagekey.

Paaleads separates out the leads into things like Mortgage, Remortgage, Adverse and Pensions advice and also lets people just bid on leads within a particular geographic region. It also has a facility where a monthly budget of lead spend can be set up.

All very interesting, but I wonder if the users of these so-called comparison sites really know what goes on behind the scenes.