The Intermediary – September 2025 - Flipbook - Page 62
In Profile.
Q&A
Jessica Bird speaks with Nick Robinson, CFO at TAB
N
ick Robinson joined TAB in
December 2024. His career has
been “driven by curiosity,” and
includes a decade as finance VP at
Mastercard. He brings regulated
CFO experience that has been invaluable in
navigating TAB’s fundraising journey.
With experience in telecoms, airlines, payments
and more, Robinson has a unique perspective on
how the world works beyond financial services,
and a vital ability to get under the hood of a new
market, asking “Why do you do it that way?” rather
than holding to the status quo.
The Intermediary caught up with Robinson as he
nears a year in the job, to discuss TAB’s growth
trajectory, his vision for the business, and the
continued rise of specialist lending.
Executing the vision
When Robinson joined, TAB was wellestablished and ready to take the step
into this next phase of growth under his
guidance. He describes the feel of the
business as “moving to change, full of
energy.” In Q1 of this year, the firm went
to market for funding and attracted
responses from numerous institutions.
He says: “I was excited by TAB’s vision
to become a mainstream lender supported
by a tech-enabled, highly experienced team.
Mainstream means supporting brokers to
serve all borrowers from low to high complexity.
Becoming mainstream requires access to material
and flexible funding.
“Serial entrepreneurs Duncan Kreeger and
Stephen Wasserman have successfully grown
lending businesses, and I am confident in their
ability to repeat that success.”
In September 2025, reinforcing this confidence
and helping to hone its vision, TAB secured an
impressive £500m facility from funds managed
by AB CarVal, marking its move to focus not just
on bridging, but the wider specialist mortgage
market. The facility is multi-year, funding both TAB
Mortgage and TAB Bridge in a combined pool.
The transaction, as Robinson puts it, is “not just
about alignment on vision and the attractive risk
and reward opportunity for CarVal.” It included
thorough due diligence across the firm’s people,
processes, controls, and technology.
He continues: “CarVal met with our people,
reviewed our policies, processes and controls, and
explored our technology. The feedback has been
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The Intermediary | September 2025
extremely complimentary and has given CarVal
the confidence to invest in TAB.
“TAB has lent over £650m to date, building
and deploying proprietary, scalable technology
that enables every part of the process that we
undertake from first contact with a broker,
powering each application through underwriting
to completion, and servicing our loan book and
borrowers thereafter. We are incredibly proud of
the institutional validation of the TAB organisation
and continue to invest to ensure we can effectively
deploy funding from investors to borrowers that
meets the needs of all.”
The choice of funder also took a lot of thought,
Robinson says: “We chose to progress our core
financing with CarVal based upon a combination
of the flexibility of the funding, competitive
pricing and the opportunity to build a long-term
partnership with a joint vision.”
While there are further opportunities to
work with several of the other investor
options in the future, “further validating
[its] capabilities and readiness to scale,”
the partnership with CarVal will remain
“at the heart of TAB.”
In practice, this long-term funding
structure will allow TAB to price
its products competitively, provide
a joined-up journey from bridge to
mortgage, ensure “faster and smarter” loans
throughout their lifecycle.
Robinson adds: “The structure supports TAB’s
NICK
ROBINSON
private investors for whom we wish to continue
to offer attractive investment propositions,
either as participants in the institutionally backed
facility, or through direct loan ownership.”
Deploying technology
One of the aspects of TAB’s proposition that held
up well under scrutiny by CarVal was its approach
to technology and artificial intelligence (AI), which
is not only a key part of the proposition, but deeply
shaped by the firm’s own values and expertise.
Robinson explains: “TAB has built its own
platform with an in-house team that has a deep
understanding of lending, and each component
of the process that TAB goes through to support
borrowers, brokers and investors.
“The experience of the entire team has been
codified in our technology, and the TAB platform
underpins all our activities and maintains a
complete record of actions and associated
documents.
