Intermediaries are a key component of today’s mortgage market, accounting for somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all new business across the market in the UK.

For Virgin Money, intermediaries are even more important to our mortgage business, representing around 90% of our new business volumes.

We are absolutely committed to ensuring that we build successful partnerships with intermediaries, and want to ensure that we do everything we can to help them grow their businesses. We believe that when our intermediary partners are successful, we’ll be successful too.

That’s why, to show you what you mean to us, we have worked with you over the last two years to make some changes to our service, including the launch of a product transfer service – assuming the customer chooses to go back to their mortgage broker for help and it is the right thing for the customer to stay with Virgin Money. I believe that’s important, as many customers want independent advice when they are looking for a new mortgage deal, but they shouldn’t have to change lenders if the right thing for them to do is stay with their existing lender.

Taking time to give customers good advice costs money. We believe that intermediaries should be rewarded fairly for giving this advice, so we’ve introduced procuration fees for when they arrange a product transfer for an existing Virgin Money customer – often called retention proc fees. As with our procuration fees for new mortgage business, these new fees are both competitive and fair and reflect the true cost of giving good advice. We think that’s important.

We don’t think that it’s fair that some lenders prevent their existing customers from accessing their front book products at maturity. So to be transparent, we’ve added our retention products onto mortgage sourcing systems, to ensure it’s as easy as possible for intermediaries to compare them with what else is in the market. Importantly, our retention products mirror our core product range, ensuring that existing customers have access to the same products as new customers.

We have worked with you to transform our service, based on your feedback and what matters to you and there’s more to come in 2017. All that remains to say is that on behalf of everyone here at Virgin Money I would like to thank you for all your support over the last 12 months, and wish you all the best for the festive season and a prosperous New Year.