Mortgage Lending Specialist

Company	PerennaSee more
Address	Perenna in Newcastle upon Tyne NE1
Form of work	- Permanent, Full-time
Salary	£28,000 - £35,000 a year
Category	Banking

Job description

We’re Perenna, a digital mortgage bank that will revolutionise the UK mortgage market. We offer a flexible 30-year fixed rate mortgage providing full payment certainty and protecting borrowers against interest rate rises.

This is the most exciting point in our history (so far!) as we work towards the launch of our market changing mortgage products and scale our bank up to service customers. We’re looking for a knowledgeable Lending Specialist to work on mortgage applications from submission to completion.

What you’ll be doing.

Lending Specialists ensure our processes from submission to completion run smoothly. You ensure all necessary details and documentation are correctly assessed in line with MCOB, FCA regulations and the Consumer Duty, so we produce compliant mortgage offers to our customers in line with our lending policies. This is a pivotal role, where you’ll support customers on their journey to owning their home.

Here’s what you’ll work on:

Mortgage application case management – you’ll manage your own case pipeline, prioritising the workload to make sure you’re giving our customers an excellent service experience and working with the team to meet agreed SLAs. You’ll also need to handle some administrative tasks where these aren’t automated.
Documentation and Application review – you ensure that all document assessments fall in line with current lending policy; this can include employed and self-employed income verification and expenditure assessment. Your judgement will be key; you might need to challenge and get further evidence on a mortgage application, provide recommendations to Underwriters for policy exceptions, ensuring risk areas are acceptable and automated decisions are correct.
Working with 3rd parties – you’ll be communicating with brokers, valuers and law firms as the process moves along.
Supporting the wider team – you’ll play an active role in process improvement and problem solving, working collaboratively with the wider Originations and Underwriting team as we scale up through our early stages of operations.

Your skills and experience.

We’re looking for people who share a passion for our mission, to change the way that mortgages work for people in the UK, and who want to be part of an early-stage company as we build and grow through our launch and into BAU.

These are the skills and experiences you could bring to Perenna that would make a great impact:

Strong expertise in mortgage applications – ideally gained from working in a similar role, where you’ve handled mortgage processing and gained a deep familiarity with the steps and procedures involved right through the customer journey.
Proven experience in mortgage related regulation – you’ll come from an FCA regulated environment, and you’ll demonstrate an understanding of MCOB, KYC, the Consumer Duty and Fraud & Financial Crime practices.
Efficient administration skills – this is a role for someone who loves paying attention to detail. If you’re at your best working to high degrees of accuracy, and you thrive on hitting high standards of quality assurance, accuracy and service levels, this role will be strongly suited to the way you work. You’ll need to juggle conflicting priorities, not getting phased by a wide-ranging case load, and your technical literacy will mean you can adapt easily to using various systems with ease.
Effective and authentic communication capability – you’ll need to be able to deal with customers, 3rd parties and colleagues around the business in a clear, authentic and engaging way. You should be able to build a trustful rapport easily and show your ability to listen well.

We are positive, energetic, and focussed as a team, and we enjoy finding pragmatic ways to do new things that change the status quo. We value transparency and collaboration, and we like to own outcomes but share successes. If these are the kind of behaviours that you value in your colleagues, you will enjoy the pace and style of work we do here. It’s a dynamic place to work – there are fewer than 80 people here at Perenna today, and everyone gets stuck in to whatever needs to be done to achieve our goals.

Rewards & Benefits at Perenna

We are still a young company raising capital through investment, so we haven’t finished adding to our benefits package yet. We decided to prioritise the most important things for our people first, a good salary, a generous pension and good life and health benefits. Here’s what’s on offer:

A base salary in the region of £28,000 to £35,000.
30 days of annual leave, with Public Holidays on top.
10% company contribution to your pension (you put in 5%)
Fully comprehensive private healthcare cover for you and your family. Our plan includes cancer cover and mental healthcare, access to a GP 24/7 and additional wellbeing benefits. You pay no contributions to any healthcare cover, just tax on the benefit in kind through payroll each month (no P11Ds to worry about).
Security for life events through our Income Protection Scheme (if you’re incapacitated and can’t work) and our Life Assurance Plan (worth 8 times your salary).
We offer support through our confidential Employee Assistance Programme whenever you need it, and access to fully trained Mental Health First Aiders across the company.
Commitment to your development, with access to training and learning opportunities to support your growth and access to thousands of free to use courses through our on-demand learning platform.

In the next year, we’ll add some additional perks and benefits, including an electric car leasing scheme – our cycle to work scheme is already up and…riding! We are also building out our incentive plans – we hope everyone at Perenna has a stake in the bank's success.

Our roles are hybrid. This means although we don’t expect you to be in the office every day, there are some things that are just better done together – in-person team training, collaborating on new processes and improvement to how we do things, informal chats and in-person get togethers to explore new things or get a wider perspective on what’s going on. This team would be looking for someone to work from our Newcastle office 2 days per week.

Things you should know.

Our selection processes are quick, but thorough. After a short initial chat to get some extra information about you, you'll have 2 more structured interviews, but we won’t hang around, and if you aren’t successful, we’ll make sure you get feedback.

We're a regulated bank, so if you're successful, our pre-employment process will include ID verification, a DBS records check, adverse credit checks (not scoring) and employment history referencing before your start date is confirmed.

All applicants need to be fully eligible to work in the UK without any restrictions. We can't support Visa sponsorship.

Things that matter to us all.

The fantastic people we have here at Perenna come from a very wide range of backgrounds and communities, but we all share the same belief that mortgages should be better, and we all want to make that happen together. We’re passionate and proud of our unique proposition, our products and our mission. We collaborate and we support each other, and our culture is inclusive and open.

Diversity of all kinds is valued and respected here, and whatever your background, your voice will be heard. That’s not just because it’s the right thing to do – we believe our diversity makes us better for our customers and helps us think big about our goals.

If you need any accommodation or adjustment to participate in our selection process, please let us know, and we’ll make it happen.

Job Types: Full-time, Permanent

Salary: £28,000.00-£35,000.00 per year

Benefits: