The Intermediary – March 2025 - Flipbook - Page 38
The Interview.
Quantum
Jessica Bird speaks with Jason Neale,
CEO at Quantum Mortgages, about the
firm’s expanding proposition, and the
values at its core
q
uantum Mortgages first
launched into the specialist
finance market in 2022.
With the backdrop of
a global pandemic and
resulting lockdowns, and a
mortgage market in chaos,
this was truly a memorable
moment. Since then,
however, the lender has
gone on to expand its proposition even further.
The Intermediary sat down with Jason Neale,
CEO, who speaks from his own experience of 25
years originating mortgages – always specialist,
with intermediaries as a focus – to reflect on a
business forged in a market like no other.
Specialist change
Over the years, Neale has worked for various
specialist lenders, from non-banks to large bank
institutions, including running buy-to-let (BTL)
for Axis Bank in the UK. When Axis decided to
close its international operations, he saw an
opportunity to launch his own operation and
leverage his experience.
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The Intermediary | March 2025
Across more than two decades, Neale
has seen significant change in specialist
lending. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis,
specialist lending was “really specialist,”
largely dominated by packagers, with few
intermediaries directly involved in the space.
Neale says: “As soon as a deal couldn’t go to
the high street, most brokers wouldn’t know
what to do with it. Fast-forward to today, and
‘specialist’ lending is the norm now.
“Historically, specialist lending was seen as
cumbersome, complicated, difficult to deal with,
but now, us specialist lenders are actually just
as easy to deal with as a high street lender.”
This has partly been driven by the increasing
complexity of client situations and the wider
housing market. Nowhere is this more evident
than in BTL.
“A lot of the transactions landlords do
nowadays will be very difficult for an automated
decisioning tool to work with,” Neale explains.
“Most banks will use some type of decisioning
tool – even if they don’t use credit scoring,
there will be some type of tool underwriters
use to help them make the decision. However,
professional landlords now have become so
complex that it has become very difficult for a
computer to make those decisions.
“Most of the underwriting we do, because
it’s far more complex, is more like detective
work. We have to find out what’s going on with
a transaction beyond the application form and
the description of the property.”
Early years
The first few years have seen the landscape
surrounding Quantum Mortgages shift
drastically. At the start, Neale recalls rates of
3.99% on the firm’s first product guide. Then,
following the onset of the war in Ukraine only
weeks after the soft launch, rates and inflation
shot up, and by the end of 2022, that same
product guide featured one fixed rate starting
with a 10. Add to this factors such as the Liz
Truss mini-Budget in September 2022, and the
stage was set to create a difficult period for the
entire property finance market.
Neale says: “It was a difficult time for all
lenders, and we were one of the only lenders
that had a fixed rate out in the market – most
withdrew all their fixed rate products. If you’re
a landlord that needs to transact right now,
