Hello, and welcome to the summer edition of our Newsletter. Can I start by saying a heartfelt thank you to everyone either directly or indirectly involved in Paradigm Mortgage services. We produced our audited final results for the year ended 31 March 2025 and in terms of mortgage completions we produced some excellent results. Paradigm Mortgages participated in mortgage completions totaling £14.2 billion (2024: £13.1bn), an 8.1% increase year on year and couldn’t have done it without the support of our broker partners and lenders, so thank you! There seems to be much going on in both the housing and lending markets currently it’s difficult to pick one topic to focus on. Regulation, the market, lender ingenuity, lender appetite, pricing, fraud, risk, climate change etc. are all front and center currently in our world. In some ways, one can’t help feeling we are heading back to 2007 with some of what is happening, unbelievably that was the year that saw the launch of the first iPhone, the publication of the final Harry Potter book, and the launch of Google Street View. In 2025 we now have lenders going up the LTV curve with two lenders offering 100% mortgages, with April mortgages making the biggest and most impressive noise in this area, but we also have many lenders now offering 97.5% loans. NatWest are back in private ownership despite costing the tax payer £10bn overall to be rescued! In addition there seems to be a new look at interest-only mortgages to make homeownership more affordable. This was among the topics debated by industry professionals recently at a roundtable ahead of the launch of the regulator’s discussion paper on affordability and access to borrowing. The Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA’s) consultation on the simplification of its lending rules is about to end and a debate around alternative affordability tests, innovation and responsible risk taking is set to begin. Already, we’ve seen big names from the high street – including Barclays, Nationwide and Santander – make changes to their affordability stress tests to allow households to borrow more. And now, among the discussions of where to go next, the idea of using interest-only to ease the affordability burden has resurfaced. We will see how this pans out. If we look at some of the key themes mentioned above continuing with regulation: It was announced there would be no fees for mortgage advisers maintained as the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) drops the levy to £356m. Mortgage intermediaries will not be required to pay an annual levy to the FSCS for 2025/26, as no new firm failures are expected. In its spring outlook, the FSCS said compensation payments were forecast to be around £250,000 and applied to failures that had already happened. Whilst that is good news, a more concerning area is the FCA’s proposed changes to mortgage rules which many feel could undermine consumer duty, according. Its consultation paper on its Mortgage Rule Review it suggests it wishes to make it Richard Howes Director of Mortgages Paradigm Mortgage Market Update 04 MORTGAGE NEWSLETTER
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