Metro Bank's Charles Morley explains why every UK lender now plays in the specialist mortgage market
Charles Morley (pictured top) has spent the best part of two decades watching the definition of "specialist lending" fall apart – and he believes 2026 marks the point at which the old boundaries barely exist at all.
Morley is director of mortgage distribution, operations and servicing at Metro Bank, the UK challenger bank, where he oversees the mortgage business end to end, from origination through to completion and management of the back book.
"If you looked at what defined specialist lending going back 10, 12 years ago, it was very simple," he told Mortgage Introducer. "People just used to perceive it as do you have adverse credit or do you not have adverse credit." That, he said, is no longer the case. "Somebody who is an ultra-high-net-worth customer looking for an ultra-high-net-worth loan is a specialist customer."
A market reshaped by the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis
Morley traces the shift back to the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, which he believes changed the "dynamic of the UK mortgage customer" more than most in the industry anticipated. "That has brought a massive element of complexity into the market," he said. "It's not for every case, of course it's not. You've still got the bulk of it that is going to shoot through a high street model."
Increasingly, though, borrowers' incomes, working patterns and credit histories do not fit neatly into that model, a trend that has coincided with tighter scrutiny from the FCA's quarterly data on mortgage lending volumes and product types.
One of the clearest examples, he said, is the buy-to-let sector's shift toward limited company borrowing. "Going back five years ago, it was all standard individuals going out to buy one or two properties," Morley said. "Pretty much every purchase that you're seeing in the market in the buy-to-let sector is a limited company now. You see very, very few, if any, individual purchases." That account lines up with recent research showing younger landlords driving the shift toward limited company structures, with company ownership now the default for new purchases.
Morley argued the added complexity has strengthened, not diminished, the case for mortgage intermediaries. "As complexities come to the market, it's played to the strength of the mortgage intermediary," he said. "They are more relevant today than they probably were yesterday, even though yesterday they were critically important."
What counts as specialist lending in 2026?
For Morley, a joint borrower sole proprietor product, a large loan case, or a landlord borrowing through a limited company can all now sit inside what he calls specialist lending – a category that has moved from a narrow test based on credit history into what he describes as a "grey area." He recalled that 15 years ago, as sales director at Kensington, only a handful of lenders could help a borrower with a 60% loan-to-value (LTV) case and a £250 county court judgment (CCJ) against their name. "Pretty much every lender within the UK mortgage market will probably now take that case," he said.
He pointed to Accord Mortgages' low-deposit range and Skipton Building Society's zero-deposit Track Record mortgage as evidence that mainstream lenders are increasingly willing to launch products once considered niche. "Those ultimately were specialist products, but they came from two of the biggest lenders in the marketplace that saw a need that existed within the marketplace and came out with a solution," he said, adding that lenders including Santander have since followed into the lower-deposit space – a pattern he expects to continue as more high street names enter the limited company buy-to-let market, following NatWest Group's move into the sector via its Landbay partnership.
Metro Bank has positioned itself firmly at the specialist end of that spectrum. Over the past 18 months, the bank has overhauled its near-prime range, expanded further into limited company buy-to-let, and entered the houses in multiple occupation (HMO) and multi-unit freehold block (MUFB) sectors.
Central to its approach, Morley said, is manual underwriting. "We still manually underwrite. Yes, we have systems that will ingest documents. Yes, we use tech to speed things up, but ultimately human beings make the decision, allowing the bank to look at the whole case in the round rather than making it fit a system".
Restructuring the intermediary team
Metro Bank has also been realigning its regional coverage, moving business development managers (BDMs) into areas it says are a better geographic fit for the intermediary community it serves across the UK.
"We've now moved those areas to make us more efficient, and the people that we're bringing in are taking over the new areas that we've created and live right in the heart of what we do," Morley said.
A cautious outlook for the rest of 2026
Despite volatility elsewhere in the global economy weighing on sentiment, Morley expects the broader UK mortgage market to hold up. His confidence lines up with UK Finance's Mortgage Market Forecast for 2026–2027, which projects gross mortgage lending will rise 4% to £300 billion this year. He described his view of the remainder of the year as coming "through a lens of my glass being firmly half full and not half empty," and pushed back on any suggestion that the buy-to-let sector has stalled.
"I would probably describe the buy-to-let market in particular as a market that's an evolution, as opposed to a market that has stopped," he said. "I just think it's evolving into what it is today and still remains a really, really important and critical part of the UK mortgage market."
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