The Intermediary – July 2025 - Flipbook - Page 50
Q&A
Together
The Intermediary speaks with Tanya Elmaz, managing
director of intermediary sales at Together, as the lender
prepares to step into the next stage of its evolution
Can you talk us through the
changes that have happened at
Together recently?
This is the beginning of Together laying a
foundation for its future growth. We’ve been
around for 51 years now, and we want to make
sure that we are around for at least another 50.
Cheryl Brough has come on as chief people
officer, to help us develop our talent programmes.
Dave Sutherland is our chief operating officer.
He comes with loads of experience in the
operations and transformation world, in the
finance industry and retail.
Then we have a brand new role – chief marketing
officer Candice Lott. We’re really looking forward
to seeing where we can take our marketing and
our messaging.
Alongside all of that is the news that Marc
Goldberg is retiring. We still have him for 18
months – that’s plenty of time, coupled with the
succession plan for Ryan Etchells, who is already
our chief commercial officer. His responsibilities
are widening to incorporate products as well as
distribution and sales.
This is all under the banner of Richard Rowntree,
who came in as group CEO about six months ago.
You’ve had your own change too
– how do you envision leading the
intermediaries team?
I’m really excited about it. I’ve been at Together
for about 10 years, so I’ve been invested in the
intermediary channel all the way up.
In the past nine to 12 months we’ve been
working on expanding our geographic regions.
I’ll continue that growth – the more brokers
can access us and talk to us, the more they can
understand how we can support them. So, the first
port of call is panel growth and to support brokers.
I’m going to continue to lead the sales team in
understanding the ‘Together way’. We’re unique.
50
The Intermediary | July 2025
I don’t think there’s another specialist lender
that has nine different products in two different
sectors. A lot of what we do is building solutions.
I’ll continue to build the sales team so that they
understand the way in which we work, and of
course leading the way with our Hero products
– regulated bridging, unregulated bridging,
commercial bridging and commercial term.
We’ll also be building the culture that we have,
which is a ‘talent up’ culture, and a relationship
culture as well. We have a culture of taking
initiative, delivering and going outside the box.
We often joke that we don’t like to say ‘no’ to any
business. It’s not because we lend on absolutely
everything and to anybody, but we are always
there to build solutions.
How important is intermediary
business to Together’s future?
Typically for the past five years it has been 5050 intermediary to direct business, but that
balance is tipping slightly, and we’re now at 55%
intermediated. I want to take that up to 60%, and
support all those brokers to work with us.
We seek to continuously deepen our
relationships with our existing partners. We work
with packagers, and they’re really key to do our
business, but there are always new brokers and
new introducers, so there has to be a continuous
evolution of those relationships, even with our
existing packagers. Deepening that relationship is
really important.
Then, there’s a continuous cycle of new brokers
that want to learn about the specialist market. A
lot of the time these brokers believe that these
are markets that they can’t understand, so there’s
a lot of education that goes into creating that
continuous evolution.
That’s why we’ve increased the regional reach
of the field-based team, to satisfy the needs of
new brokers. There’s definitely scope for plenty of
growth in the intermediated market.
For the last 10 years, Together has actually
grown month-on-month, because of the demands
of brokers wanting to understand specialist
