Hinckley & Rugby Building Society has been supporting borrowers and savers for almost 160 years.
But we wouldn’t be here with a market-leading proposition designed to meet the needs of today’s borrowers if we didn’t regularly review and update our products and services.
Refreshing our brand is an important part of this.
It gives us the opportunity to think about what is important to us as a lender — what we stand for today, and where our future ambitions lie — but also how we communicate this outside of the business, to our broker and intermediary partners and wider customer base.
We have sought to strengthen our brand identity, to ensure it projects a more modern image that better reflects H&R’s position in today’s mortgage market.
The new look certainly reflects our national reach and digital focus, with our H&R for Intermediaries brand a key part of this redesign, emphasising the crucial role they play advising millions of homeowners, particularly those who might struggle to get a mortgage from mainstream high street banks.
A rebrand is about more than just a snazzy new logo.
Relaunching the H&R Building Society helps us focus on our core purpose: to support members and communities in creating a better financial future for themselves.
This purpose is embedded across our product range. At H&R we know that a ‘one size fits all’ approach is never going to support a membership that comes from across the country, includes first-time buyers, later life borrowers, and all ages in between, while also covering people from a diverse range of backgrounds. As a result, our membership has very different borrowing needs.
For us, meeting these varied needs is not about launching an ever-growing number of new mortgage products. Frankly, this just serves to make brokers’ lives more difficult, keeping track of different product options and then trying to select the most appropriate one for their clients.
At H&R we’ve taken a different approach: rather than trying to shoehorn applicants into one of our mortgage products, we offer a more select product range — but each of these mortgages can be ‘flexed’ to ensure it meets the specific needs of your clients.
Our ‘Flex’ mortgage range is specifically designed to meet the needs of borrowers with more complicated or unusual income streams, as well as those who may have experienced credit blips or more serious financial difficulties in the past.
Given the difficulties the country has been through in recent years, from the Covid-19 pandemic through to the cost-of-living crisis, we understand that these are issues that are now affecting a far greater number of homeowners. Sadly, many of these borrowers are not well-served by mainstream lenders.
This is where we see our role: offering specialist services but with our mutual heritage at a price point that is closer to the high street.
At H&R we also aim to listen to brokers and respond to market challenges quickly and sensitively, to ensure we are supporting as many borrowers as possible. We update product criteria on a regular basis to respond to particular issues we see in the market, particularly around affordability. Along with our investment in digital systems, this helps make the broker’s path to application as smooth as possible, ultimately meaning faster decisions for your clients.
Another example of this is changes made to the maximum borrowing ages, now set at 85 across our product range, helping homeowners in their 50s, 60s and beyond who have yet to pay off their mortgage in full.
This customer-centric approach isn’t just baked into our product design. It runs though our processes and service standards. As a manual underwriter, we can carefully consider individual cases on their own merits, giving us the flexibility to get to that hard-to-find ‘yes’.
This rebrand helps us communicate our purpose going forward, which will hopefully see us agreeing more mortgages for more clients through more intermediaries. We believe this will help us fulfil our long-term ambitions: to grow our business in a sustainable manner which will help ensure the financial security of our members for many years to come.
Danny Cranie is chief customer officer at Hinckley & Rugby Building Society
