Operations Team Manager

About us

Belmont Green provide mortgage solutions operating through its “Vida Homeloans” brand for Buy to Let (BTL) and residential borrowers (ROO) who find themselves underserved elsewhere. Our borrowers range from Buy to Let investors, to the self-employed and customers with multiple jobs. Our business model and strategy are underpinned by our core purpose to ‘Help More People Find a Place to call Home’.

We are here to help the under-served, especially those with more nuanced personal circumstances or borrowing needs who are not able to access a mortgage from a mainstream mortgage lender. Working exclusively with intermediary partners, we combine cutting-edge technology with skilled and caring underwriting expertise to solve complex customer problems.

As a business with an aspiration to become a bank and grow over the coming years, we recognise the importance of having a clearly articulated culture strategy and the need to actively manage how it embeds in the business together with the behaviours which exemplify it.

As a recognised Best Companies Top 100 mid-sized company to work for in the UK and a finalist at the Financial Reporter Women’s Recognition Awards, we take pride in our diverse workforce, championing both ethic and gender diversity through our EDI commitments.

Having met the target set by being a member of the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter we have 50% of senior management roles filled by women.

With offices in Egham, London, and Skipton, we bring our teams together regularly to collaborate and empower our colleagues to have more choice around when and where they work on the days they are not in the office, with colleagues working remotely in various locations across the UK.

Our Culture

We are proud to have built a culture founded on an ethos of caring, and that sits at the heart of our Vida Values, driving the way we run our business, support our customers and other stakeholders on a daily basis.

We genuinely care about delivering the right outcomes for all of our stakeholders who we consider through the cultural framework as our customers, colleagues, company and communities that we operate in.

By Joining Vida you will have a sense of belonging in what is a diverse and collaborative environment, where you will be empowered to take responsibility for driving delivery.

We embrace a diversity of backgrounds and experiences in our people, in the deeply held belief that better outcomes are achieved for customers when our colleagues are better placed to empathise with and understand their unique circumstances. From application to interview, we place inclusion at the heart of all we do.

Role Overview:

The successful applicant will lead a mortgage underwriting team within New Business Operations, ensuring effective processing, administering and decisioning of all mortgage applications.

They will continually look for ways to deliver an excellent standard of service to our customers by supporting their team in achieving key objectives and by using operational excellence techniques to continually develop their people and the processes they use, whilst ensuring that all financial, quality, regulatory, risk and service requirements are maintained through effective oversight and control.

Key Responsibilities:

• Act as a role model for behaviours and create a productive and constructive team culture in a remote working environment
• Understand and effectively manage team wellbeing and morale through regular catch ups and 1:1s, and with effective use of the support provided by the business
• Recognise and share excellent individual performance with the senior management team and wider business through the range of recognition channels
• Understand and raise key team challenges along with proposed solutions
• Optimise their team’s output through effective allocation and workload and capacity management, ensuring their team meets key KPIs and SLAs on a daily, weekly & monthly basis
• Set individual annual objectives, aligned to business goals
• Keep accurate records of their peoples’ performance against their annual objectives to share with them at regular intervals, and for presenting at periodic performance calibration sessions
• Use effective leadership and feedback to develop their people and support them to achieve their personal development goals
• Support underperforming individuals to improve through effective performance management
• Ensure their team maintains a high level of customer service
• Ensure all decisions are made within regulatory standards aligned with business needs and lending risk strategy
• Ensure responsibilities regarding Consumer Duty, the Prevention of Financial Crime (including AML, identification and reporting of fraud) and responsible lending are carried out effectively and in accordance with the company’s policies
• Present their team’s performance at regular operational performance sessions
• Build strong relationships with their people, counterparts and key stakeholders across the business, and externally with suppliers and customers
• Work as part of the NBO management team, sharing common role responsibilities for optimum operational effectiveness
• Identify ways to improve productivity, decisioning quality and service to intermediaries and assist in the continued improvement of the originations systems, processes and procedures
• Support the change environment including the testing lifecycle, system development and the delivery of relevant key changes
• Be involved in the wider change management process by attending and contributing to meetings surrounding the company wide change landscape
• Achieve their own annual objectives
• Self-manage and organise their own workload in line with business priorities
• Maintain an up to date working knowledge of our products and policies
• Maintain knowledge of the current regulations and legislation applicable to underwriting
• Ensure that all complaints are handled in accordance with the Complaints Handling procedure
• On occasion, be a representative of the business at third party locations

Requirements:

Leadership Skills and Personal Qualities:

• Excellent leadership behaviours, including strong interpersonal skills, influence and effective communication
• A desire to embrace the company’s strategy and create a high performing team culture that embodies our values
• Able to develop a team by motivating and building skillsets through coaching, mentoring, training and effective development plans that drive results, support retention and succession planning
• Be a role model for behaviours, with strong personal resilience and drive to succeed
• Able to work under their own initiative and multi-task to balance competing priorities in a fast-paced environment
• Be a strong team player
• Ability to produce, analyse and interpret data, business requirements and regulatory guidelines
• The awareness and drive to proactively identify, manage and support departmental improvement and drive operational excellence
• The confidence to constructively challenge others with your own well thought out opinions, and to challenge the status quo
• An ability to work with ambiguity

Knowledge and Experience:

• A minimum of 5 year’s team management and leadership experience in an operational environment, including strong people management, development, coaching and performance management skills
• Demonstrable experience of effectively leading teams to deliver operational targets and of improving operational efficiency
• Experience working in a financial service ‘new business’ environment and working knowledge of the applicable regulations and legislation (specialist mortgage underwriting experience desirable)
• Proficient in MS Office (i.e. Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and PowerPoint)

Our Values

Our values are well established and recognised throughout our organisation. They provide a frame of reference for the behaviours expected from our colleagues every day.

We find ways to break old conventions, especially those which cause exclusion or customer harm. We look for these qualities when hiring new talent into the organisation, and they underpin our approach to personal development and performance management for all our people. At the heart of this is the fact we care about our Customers, Our Colleagues and our Communities. We are:

Visionary - We innovate and break old habits, thinking big and pushing boundaries together as one team

Inclusive - We value each other’s differences and work to see people for who they really are

Dynamic - We are flexible and fast, cutting through complexity and never accepting second best

Authentic - We are honest and genuine, what you see is what you get

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package to support our employees’ professional and personal needs. Further details can be provided upon application.