Start with the problem, not the product.

Most people in specialist finance broking typically come from backgrounds such as private banking, investment banking, or experience at a specialist lender. Their approach is product-focused, fitting borrowers into pre-existing frameworks. I, however, come from a different path. My background is in customer research, proposition development, and large-scale customer experience transformation, primarily with Vodafone. While this isn’t traditional specialist finance, the discipline’s principles are highly applicable and shape the initial questions I ask before moving forward.

The customer-experience perspective begins with the problem, not the product. In a specialist finance setting, that means I don’t just want to know that a lender is available or that their criteria seem appropriate on paper. Many brokers stop there. I aim to understand the real experience of the funding process, how decisions are made, where transactions stall, and whether the relationship genuinely benefits Credco’s clients in practice, not just on paper.

This shifts my perspective on lender partnerships. The static panel approach relies on a lender’s stated criteria as a dependable guide, but in my experience, they often aren’t. The truly valuable insights are behind the scenes: who actually makes the decisions, whether the business development and credit teams are coordinated, and how the lender reacts when deals become complex. Gathering this information requires effort and must be updated frequently, as these factors are rarely constant.

The result is a partnership network built around the experience our clients actually have, rather than the experience the panel sheet promises. Across bridging and development finance, auction finance and the wider book, that lens is the one we keep returning to. The product matters. The experience behind the product matters even more. Meet the team building it.