Santander joined the Council in November 2022. The firm’s Ben Richardson took time out of his busy day to introduce himself.
What is your role at Santander? My title is product proposition, senior manager, mortgages. My team look at new markets or products for Santander’s mortgage offering. We took the decision to become members of the Equity Release Council earlier this year due to having recently launched a referral partnership with Legal & General to support our customers in later life and helping them to find the right support and advice to find out more about their options as they come to the end of their mortgage term. Whilst Santander are not a provider of Later Life mortgages or equity release, we understand that it is important to stay abreast of any movements in the market and be familiar with best practices.
Describe your working day using emojis. 🤔🤣🧐📞💻
What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve learned or experienced while working in your industry? Probably how resilient both mortgage professionals and our customers are during challenging times. I have worked through a recession, MMR, COVID-19, cost of living crisis and more and continue to be amazed at people’s capacity to adapt to change and keep moving forward.
If you could swap roles with anyone else in your company for a day, who would it be, and what do you think you’d learn from the experience?
Definitely someone from credit risk, the team that make the decisions on what we can lend and to who. It’s often viewed as the ‘dark side’ by people in my role but I’d love to step across for the day and think I’d learn lots from the experience, fully understanding the background they base decisions on would make me a more well-rounded and patient product manager.
What’s the most exciting project you’ve been a part of at your company, and why? Our most exciting, and the most recent in fact, was the one my team delivered in July when we announced our renewed partnership with Legal & General. Santander now proactively talks to our customers about what later life mortgages are and how they can find out more information should they be interested. This is a positive solution for our customers who had been asking us to support them with their later life lending requirements for a while. The project was challenging due to historic conceptions of equity release products, and we had to also make sure we continued to operate in line with new principles under Consumer Duty. It was a challenging and exciting project to be part of and has already started to benefit our customers.
Who inspires you and why? Lots of people, my mum was probably my biggest inspiration and I have always admired her perseverance, work ethic and directness. My kids inspire me to do better and of course, the king, Thierry Henry, for the way he did his business on the pitch.
Tell us about a hobby or passion of yours outside of work that you enjoy. Boxing and food (both cooking and eating it). Unfortunately, my love of food generally negates the positive effects that the boxing training has! I find cooking therapeutic and like to challenge myself, also, the kitchen can be a great place to hide from the kids for an hour or two.
Name your dream holiday location. Canada, I’d love to spend a few weeks exploring the country and have always found the vastness of it fascinating, one for retirement should that day ever arrive.
What is the best book you have read? Hard to pick one, so I’ll say two. Atonement by Ian McEwan and Be good, Love Brian by Craig Bromfield.
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