Jonathan Rubins of Alternative Bridging Corporation on growth, institutional backing, and why human judgement still wins in complex finance
Jonathan Rubins (pictured top), director and chief commercial officer of Alternative Bridging Corporation (ABC), speaks the way he lends – directly and without much padding.
Ask him about pricing pressure in bridging, the encroachment of AI, or the mood among brokers navigating a disjointed market, and he will give you a considered, candid, and often disarmingly self-deprecating response. What he struggles to do is pretend the past 18 months have been easy.
"I think brokers have had a challenging job," Rubins told Mortgage Introducer. "They've had a lot of transactions where they're saying something which is commercially correct, and then somebody's shoving it into ChatGPT, getting a different story, and either going to a different broker or coming back at the broker and going, 'well, my research says da-da-da'. I think that has really been a problem."
It is a telling observation from a man whose own firm has spent three decades building a business on human judgement – on the premise that complex property finance requires a person in the room, not a process in the cloud.
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The business behind the name
ABC was not planned. It grew out of a client dispute. Rubins was working as a broker in the early 1990s when a major lender penalised a key borrower for a late payment. His father Brian – the firm's executive chairman – told him plainly that it could not happen again. The response was to start lending themselves, quietly at first, from the garden of a colleague's home.
"It kind of just ticked along," Rubins said. "We did a deal here, a deal there." The firm shifted into bridging as a full-time focus from around 2010, when the post-2008 broker market dried up.
ABC now employs around 40 people across bridging, development finance, regulated lending, term loans, commercial mortgages and the alternative overdraft – a pre-approved facility drawable at 24 hours' notice, secured against base security, allowing investors to move with certainty at auction. The firm's product range expanded further following its acquisition of Cheval, which brought regulated residential lending into the portfolio under Allan Kay.
The most recent addition is Alternative Commercial Mortgages (ACM) – a commercial mortgage term product offering terms of five to 30 years that Rubins is visibly enthused about. ABC had always offered a version internally, but it was never priced keenly enough to compete in the open market. The new offering sits within the broad band of competitor pricing and carries ABC’s longstanding comfort with commercial, semi-commercial, and mixed-use property.
“Having that slight commercial bias means that we can deal with transactions where you need to have a feel for commercial property and semi-commercial mixed property,” Rubins said. The broker portal supporting ACM was built from the ground up, incorporating AI functionality, and has been better received than he anticipated. “In August I was having a slightly Jonathan nervous moment of, oh, what have I done?” he said. “And actually, it’s gone really well.”
The case for institutional backing
In March, ABC secured a £70 million facility with Quilam Capital, with capacity of up to £150 million. The significance is less about novelty than scale.
"It allows us to price slightly more keenly," Rubins said. "And that allows us to talk to some of the larger brokerages in terms of sourcing models."
But pricing is never the headline act. What ABC considers its real differentiator is certainty of delivery for brokers and borrowers. The firm will say no often and without apology – but when it says yes, it follows through.
"If I'm really honest, the thing brokers care about the most is certainty of delivery," Rubins said. "It's all very exciting getting X per cent commissions and so on. But if the money doesn't appear, you'll get zero per cent, and that is a problem."
People first, algorithms second
Each transaction is allocated to a specific team from start to finish, with an underwriter involved in the borrower conversation early. That approach puts ABC against the tide of automation reshaping how specialist lenders process deals.
"We are a people first business, and that is really where I want us to be," Rubins said. "I don't see tokenised lending, where credit decisions are made entirely by automated systems, as anything other than a long way away."
His view is that the market is polarising. Regulated residential mortgages can increasingly be processed by algorithm. Specialist finance is different. The nuance too high, the property types too varied, the borrower circumstances too individual. Rubins is also direct about something he feels is frequently overlooked.
"I think the broker market is much misunderstood," he said. "People think it's basically someone gets an enquiry and phones a mate. These are big, driven businesses which are thinking about what they're doing, because they have to."
When asked what he would change about how brokers use specialist lenders, his answer was characteristically candid. He pushed back on the premise entirely, arguing the real need is education rather than behavioural change.
"I think an education piece is always important – we didn't know you did that, or we didn't know you could do it like that," he said. "That's why we run a lot of stuff around case studies, so brokers can say, 'ah, I've got one of those.'"
The pricing question and reading the room
The bridging market has become increasingly aggressive on price. Free valuations, reduced arrangement fees, and procuration fee incentives have become common. Rubins watched it with something close to detachment.
"I'm going to be really honest – we've never really joined in the race," he said. "Everyone needs to come out feeling they got a good deal."
He uses automated valuation models (AVMs) where appropriate, primarily for speed, but has no interest in free valuations as a competitive weapon. Two markets are emerging, and ABC has chosen its side. "I almost feel like saying, they've got their business and I've got mine," he said.
On the wider market, the picture is cautiously improving. Through 2025 and into 2026, ABC saw heavy refinancing volumes as borrowers sought to manage costs. New transactions are now starting to move again, driven partly by vendors becoming more realistic on price.
"We are certainly seeing a greater influx of new transactions," Rubins said.
He is optimistic about the government's direction on housing, describing the Your First Home scheme as making him excited "just because I'm a salesman," and expects government housebuilding commitments to give development lending – currently the quietest part of the ABC book – a lift. The specialist lending market is evolving, he argues, even if the label attached to it has not quite kept pace.
A broker once told him he wished "bridging" was not in the company name because it set client expectations before a conversation had even started. Rubins is at peace with it.
"You can't ignore that a major part of all of these businesses is we are bridging lenders," he said. "And really what the broker cares about the most is certainty of delivery."
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