After four and a half years, I am moving on from my role of Chief Commercial Officer at Gen H to join Principality Building Society. I am inclined to reflection at times like these, and what I have learned from my time at Gen H.

Joining Gen H from my banking background was a huge change – I hadn’t been so in the weeds, doing the work, in a long time. I worked directly with teams to design and deliver new propositions, make precise criteria and pricing tweaks, and find new funders. And when we did something right, the little counter on our company dashboards labelled ‘homeowners created’ would tick-up higher and higher. The link between strategy and customer impact is satisfyingly direct in a startup world!

We were – and still are – obsessed with the mission: helping everyone access homeownership. And because we were a startup in the truest sense of the word, very few of us came from a mortgage or banking background. This meant we were never constrained by conventional approaches. We weren’t just trying to meet our basic obligations as a regulated mortgage lender – we were looking for entirely new ways to help people achieve their dreams.

Surprisingly, this all became possible because of Gen H’s funding model. Gen H isn’t a bank, it doesn’t hold deposits; instead, it’s forward-flow funded by values-aligned funders. When Gen H was developing this model, forward-flow was reasonably uncommon in the residential lending space – and it wasn’t until the team looked off the high street that they found the ideal partners: building societies.

At first glance, scrappy fintech startups and legacy mutuals are not natural bedfellows. But over the years, I was surprised to find this pairing incredibly productive. Why? Because our partnerships prioritise shared values, not shareholders.

With building society partners, we worked to find a complementary balance. Mutuals have big deposit bases to lend out and often want to grow but can be limited by their ability to innovate with speed. Fintech lenders like Gen H, by contrast, need cheap money and can build and originate quickly and at scale.

In the same vein, mutuals can be willing to take more risk, because they recognise that “creditworthy” has a wider definition than the high street would have you think. But these are specific risk appetites. This works extraordinarily well for Gen H, because the systems allow us to allocate loans to specific funders based on granular requirements, and we can update this depending on funder capacity. And because we both depend on the performance of these loans, we’re invested in underwriting high-quality assets.

These partnerships are possible because we recognise the value in helping people access homeownership. We see it as a social good, not just a commercial opportunity. When the “homeowners created” counter ticks over a new milestone at Gen H, that’s because the team has sat in a room with our mutual counterparts and collaborated, asking tough questions and arriving at hard-won answers.

As I approach my last day at Gen H, I am so optimistic about the future that these relationships can provide and the equitable lending they can unlock.

Industry tides have already shifted since I joined Gen H. We were among the first residential lenders to operate with this multi-funder, people-first model. But today, there is more support than ever for partnerships like these – and a real willingness to reimagine what lending and funding structures can look like.

As I join Principality, a building society that is transforming for growth and who not only supports new homeowners but also funds the building of new homes, too, I can’t wait to see what we, as an industry, will achieve next.

Pete Dockar is chief commercial officer at Gen H