There are no plans to merge the OSB Group brands following the amalgamation of the Precise and Kent Reliance sales teams, says Adrian Moloney amid a raft of announcements from the bank.

The group has made a plethora of changes in recent months, including bringing the two BDM teams together, but Moloney, who heads up Precise Mortgages, Kent Reliance and InterBay as group intermediary director says there is “quite a clear multi-brand strategy, with each doing different things.”

There is now one team of 16 business development managers who support brokers with both Precise and Kent Reliance.

“It adds value to brokers when they can talk from a two-brand point of view, and if a case doesn’t fit with Precise it might fit with Kent and vice versa,” Moloney told Mortgage Strategy.

“Of the specialist lenders we have the largest broker support team in the UK.”

He says that while at Precise the application process is systems orientated, with a quick turn around on a yes or no decision, at Kent, the case will be manually underwritten, allowing deals that might be rejected through Precise.

“The two offerings complement each other and one kind of leads to the other,” says Moloney, “but actually having someone with a broker that can say ‘no this doesn’t fit with Precise but I can make it work with Kent’ adds additional value – it’s two for the price of one.”

The group has also added 10 telephony BDMs, to accommodate those brokers who don’t plan on returning to the office post-pandemic but still want support on a call or video meeting.

“Everything pre-AIP sits with myself and Simon (Cockerill) runs that for me so he’s got a big beast of a team that manage inbound calls but also these ten telephony BDMs that support each of the regions where the on-the-road BDMs sit so they have the same familiarity with the products.”

In further news from OSB, the InterBay brand team, headed up by Emily Hollands, has increased to seven specialist finance account managers who are on the road visiting brokers to discuss their bridging and commercial products.

“That kind of business really does need that face-to-face contact because they are more complex deals and tend to be larger,” says Moloney, adding that the InterBay dedicated team has been kept separate so as not to confuse it with the longer-term lending brands.

A new range of bridging products has also been launched through InterBay and Precise, including a developer exit range for conversions of commercial units into flats.

In late 2019, OneSavingsBank and Charter Court Financial Services completed a merger. It is now known as OSB Group. Late last year, group managing director Alan Cleary retired and was replaced by Jon Hall.

Moloney says OSB wanted to ensure it was not standing still post-pandemic and has further widened its coverage of the market with its new high net worth division.

“We feel we’re ahead of the pack with this. We’ve got a large portfolio of clients in this area and want to support them in a more dedicated way, so Marc Callaghan and Krissy Salmon are our two dedicated HNW managers who will work with brokers who have those clients with us to grow, maintain and develop that space.

“No other lender has done this in our space. We feel this sets us apart.”