Sport has given him skills for business, as he builds a new lender
Some of the key skills with which Darrell Walker (pictured) is establishing new lender ModaMortgages have been learned not in a boardroom, but on a football pitch. The director of sales and distribution at Chetwood Bank is shaping its new specialist buy-to-let proposition for intermediaries.
As a young man, fresh out of school, Walker chose management training with the then National Westminster Bank, over an apprenticeship with a professional football club – his parents wanted him to have a good, solid career behind him. He thrived and enjoyed the interaction with customers, who would ask for him by name. Over 30 years later, he has a robust pedigree of financial services experience and leadership roles, having worked for names such as Barclays Bank, Coventry Building Society, Bank of Ireland, Legal & General and Lloyd Banking Group – and, importantly, he has no regrets about what might have been with soccer. He played semi-professionally for Derby County until he was 30, and the sport clearly influences his approach to work, even now. So, joining financial services was the right move.
“Looking back, it's the best thing I did,” Walker told Mortgage Introducer. “My mum and dad were right, I'll stand by that. My football journey gave me a confidence, it made me very resilient, it made me competitive. It forces you to be a team player and if I go back to my Derby days, there was a phrase on the wall where we trained, that I regularly use for my two boys, and I regularly use at work. The phrase is ‘hard work beats talent, if talent doesn't work hard’, and the one thing I've always prided myself on is that ability to go the extra mile. If you can see a problem coming down the track, the quicker you deal with that problem. A problem won't fix itself - you need to challenge it head on and deal with it. A lot of the tenacity that's in me definitely comes from my football days, without a shadow of a doubt. If you're one of those 11 players on the pitch, you've got to show up, you cross that white line and you give it everything. I always say if something's worth doing it, it's worth giving it absolutely everything.”
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The importance of honesty and communication in mortgages
When Walker joined digital bank Chetwood, in 2022, to build ModaMortgages, he came in with what he describes as a blank piece of paper. “We haven’t got a silver bullet proposition,” he said, “but the one thing that I quickly got my head around was that people want honesty, they want openness, they want communication. Brokers love you to do the basic things really well, to the best of your ability, so we've tried to build a brand that has that ethos from a recruitment point of view. We've taken on what I believe will be the future rockstars in this industry, some new kids on the block, and the one thing they've all got are the skills I can't teach them – to be likeable, tenacious, genuine, sincere. You've either got that or you haven't. I very much looked for some of the softer skills when building the team and the proposition, to make us that lender that people are going to enjoy working with, they'll be able to trust.”
Walker is still doing one of the things that has given him most pride during his working life - helping people grow their career. “I believe if you work hard and you're prepared to get your head down and learn, there’s lots of opportunity in financial services and certainly in the intermediary sector,” he reasoned. "I say to my team that honesty, speed and communication are the three big things. If we can't do a deal, we need to tell a broker quickly and efficiently that we can't. If something's not quite worked out, hold your hand up because no one goes out of their way to get something wrong or make a bad decision. We all do it at times.”
ModaMortgages officially launched in January after a controlled launch over much of the past year, to test ‘the bumps in the road’. “We want to do things with urgency, but we don't want to rush it and get it wrong,” Walker said. “We were tempted at one point to say, ‘you know what, we're ready, let's just go for it.’ I'm really pleased that we took that controlled approach. It now means that within the Chetwood Bank stable, we have got two intermediary lending arms which we will look to deploy in different ways.” He added: “You're worried on the day that you launch and you tell the market that you're live and the doors are open, that you're going to get a bit of tumbleweed and nothing else, but we've had a fantastic start to the life of Moda and we're really buoyant.”
