NatWest Intermediary Solutions has hired a team of five new phone-based business development managers (BDMs).
It has also appointed Nicola Brown as its new sales manager to lead the team. The new team will be operational from 2 January.
The quintet are Michelle Edgeley, Catherine Dair, Hayley Giles, Mike Bone and Chris Taylor.
Brown and the team will be based in Norwich working alongside the existing phone BDM team run by Mark Cracknell.
The firm has had a phone-based BDM team of 10 in operation for the last two and half years and, in anticipation of business volumes for 2013, has built its resource to improve its support to brokers.
Further recruitment is planned for early 2013 to boost numbers in its BDM, LiveTALK and broker administration teams.
Mark Bullard, head of sales at NatWest Intermediary Solutions, said: “We know that intermediaries value their BDM contacts and appreciate being able to deal with someone who is responsive to their needs. Our new BDMs will be on hand day-to-day to help brokers source the right mortgage deals for their clients, aid them with packaging, talk through things like criteria and sort out issues with applications.
“I am really pleased to welcome somebody of Nicola’s calibre as she has a breadth of experience from the retail sector that will give us a more rounded approach to the way we service our intermediary partners. The extra resource we are planning to introduce to our LiveTALK and broker administration teams will give our BDMs more time to spend with their panel of brokers.
“I think it’s fair to say that we have rebuilt our proposition over the last two or three years. We have established a broad range of attractive products, with a straightforward online application submission system; a pioneering instant messaging service in LiveTALK that offers speedy resolution to brokers’ application queries, that has proved to be very popular, backed up with a reliable application processing service and topped off with an experienced team of BDMs. Adding further talent to the BDM team shows that we are truly committed to the intermediary sector.”
