Our strategy

Our strategy is focused on delivering sustainable, profitable growth by helping customers who are underserved by the High Street banks. Our scalable state-of-the-art automated technology and systems ensure efficient processing, strong risk control, timely reporting and speed of product development. We use our experience and knowledge of the assets we manage and have analysed to select segments of the lending markets where we believe strong returns can be achieved within our credit risk appetite. These factors have enabled strong balance sheet growth, increasing cost efficiency, profitability, and the exceptional credit quality of our mortgage assets.

We operate three specialist financial services brands - Precise Mortgages, Exact Mortgage Experts and Charter Savings Bank - that deliver value for customers, shareholders and employees.


Deliver high quality growth and sustainable and attractive risk-adjusted returns

Our aim is to maintain our position as the UK’s leading specialist mortgage lender through excellence in all aspects of our operations. We plan to accomplish our strategic objective by delivering sustainable balance sheet growth within our risk appetite, supported by a diverse funding mix. Our future success is dependent on our relationship with our customers, intermediaries and employees – all of whom we value highly.

Ian Lonergan
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Charter Court Financial Services

We operate in selected specialist mortgage markets where we can deploy our deep credit knowledge

£7.0bn
mortgage balances
£7.8bn
billion assets administered

We deliver a quality service and product proposition to mortgage brokers and their customers

#1
UK's leading specialist mortgage lender
Over 23,000
introducers registered with the Group
8 minutes
average time to Decision in Principle

We deploy consistent underwriting decisions efficiently to effectively mitigate credit risk

£81k
aggregate losses on mortgage lending since inception
0.4%
of the total loan book in arrears of three months or more
0.082%
cost of risk of total portfolio in H1 2019

We have an efficient and scalable, bespoke operating platform

31.7%
cost income ratio

We have a dynamic and sophisticated funding strategy

£6.0bn
retail deposits
12
securitisation transactions since 2013
£1,127.8m
drawn from the Bank of England's Term Funding Scheme

We aim to deliver strong growth and sustainable returns to our shareholders

26.5%
return on equity
All figures as at 30 June 2019, unless stated otherwise.
 

Our lending strategy

 Target attractive, underserved secured lending markets

Through the Precise Mortgages brand, the Group targets specialist mortgage lending markets that are underserved by large and medium-sized UK retail banks and building societies, and are underpinned by positive long-term market dynamics.

 Leverage our deep credit expertise and extensive product knowledge to achieve market leadership

Precise Mortgages is led by experienced industry professionals and is supported by highly skilled teams with experience and insight spanning the entire mortgage lifecycle.

By drawing on a large product development pipeline Precise Mortgages can rapidly deploy its tailored products in attractive lending segments where we can secure significant market share.

 Employ our automated underwriting platform to efficiently maintain rigorous credit standards

Precise Mortgages uses a bespoke, automated decision-making platform to manage mortgage applications, delivering a rapid decision in principle, based on our rigorous, codified lending policy rules and credit scores.

The platform enables Precise Mortgages to react quickly to non-standard mortgage requests which are common in our target markets, while ensuring consistent underwriting within the Group’s risk appetite.


Our funding strategy

 Maintain and develop our established retail savings business as a growing and predictable source of funding

Charter Savings Bank aims to maintain and develop its award-winning business, by further diversifying its product offering to access new funding pools and continuing to offer competitive new savings products in its existing product lines.

 Exploit wholesale funding markets opportunistically to deliver optimal cost of funds

Charter Court uses its securitisation platform as an alternative financing tool, to optimise the balance of the Group’s funding sources and to secure low cost of funds when market conditions are favourable.

Charter Court is able to access, but does not depend on, securitisation funding. Instead, the Group is able to use securitisation opportunistically in a competitive retail deposit market to rebalance the weighted average life of the Group’s liabilities.