Interview
Around the same time the group brought in Mike Taylor as operations director, with the pair joining the existing senior management team of Wilson, operations director Jenny Price and head of distribution Ray McCarthy. Little joined from law firm Blacks Connect, where he was sales director, while before that he was commercial director at TMA Mortgage Club. “The thinking behind that, in terms of where we want to go, was bringing in different skillsets not necessarily from the later life sector, but within the financial services industry so we can use our experiences to help bind and grow the business in the next phase,” says Little. “My role is to make sure that our proposition is commercially attractive to our members. It’s about making sure our products, our distribution and our lender relationships are at the level they need to be.” Since he joined there’s been a lot of self-reflection on which aspects of the group work well and which don’t. In response Air Group has agreed new terms with members and widened its proposition to include funeral plans, wills and LPAs. This means that the club will help advisers recommend products in those areas, while they will also form part of the Air Later Life Academy’s training events. The group has also expanded its lender panel. In the past few weeks it has added building societies in Buckinghamshire, Nottinghamshire, as well as a home reversion plan provider in Retirement Bridge. Wilson says Little has taken a key role in establishing a partnership with Right Mortgage Club, providing access to later life lending for members of the club. “That was a prime example of where he took ownership of a project and basically went out and built a bespoke proposition
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for them,” Wilson says. “That’s reflective of where we are at an organisation – we are not going to forget our little individual independent members.”
Air Sourcing
Wilson seems proud of Air Sourcing, a sourcing system that filters various equity release and later life residential products.
“Air Group has agreed new terms with members and widened its proposition to include funeral plans, wills and LPAs. This means that the club will help advisers recommend products in those areas, while they will also form part of the Air Later Life Academy’s training events” “The market has moved so quickly that we’ve gone from having 30 or 40 products in the market to 150 product variations,” he says. “You can’t contain all that in your memory unless you have a brain like an IBM computer, and keep up to date with those product changes.” At the time of interviewing two thirds of lenders changed their rates that week, which would make it incredibly difficult for an equity release adviser not using software. The system has API functionality, however Wilson says he’s waiting on the providers to develop the capabilities to link up with the system. “We have built a row of special plug sockets, but now lenders need to build the plugs,” he adds. “We are leading the pack on innovation.” In future he says he welcomes more competition from other sourcing system providers. “A lot of people think it’s great being in a market with no competition, but actually it’s hard to keep absolutely on the cutting edge of JULY 2019
what you do if nobody is chasing you,” he reflects.
Offset equity release
In future, Wilson would like to see equity release providers develop an offset product, where consumers could put money into a savings account that offsets the cost of loan. “That is not a mile away,” he says. “We are halfway there with drawdown. “If I had said this two years ago people would have looked at me and said ‘that will never happen’ but we are probably 80% to getting to that point. “That’s the type of innovation I’d like to see.” He reckons the growing size of the equity release market makes the development of more innovative products like offset equity release more likely, as providers are now more likely to get enough business to make it worthwhile to develop new solutions. Little adds that Air Group regularly has discussions with providers about products they would like to see, for example he says he’s been advising a soon-to-launch provider about releasing a higher loan-to-value equity release product for slightly younger customers than your typical equity release client.
Joining up equity release and residential
Stuart Wilson says joining up the equity release industry with later life products is his passion. Residential providers, like Leeds Building Society, launched into Retirement Interest-Only (RIO) mortgages last year, after the Financial Conduct Authority changed its rules on the product in March 2018 to classify the RIO as a residential mortgage. However the product has been slow to get off the ground, while lenders still appear to be divided on how the product should be treated. The likes of Mansfield Building Society demand that advisers who arrange a RIO MORTGAGE INTRODUCER
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