OakNorth starts building-out mortgages for high-net-worths and entrepreneurs

CEO Rishi Khosla is expanding his empire beyond business lending and property finance.

Britain’s most-valuable fintech, OakNorth, is expanding its lending into retail mortgages.

OakNorth announced today that it would start offering mortgages for “affluent individuals with atypical sources of income”.

The bank is looking to lend from £500,000 to high-net-worth individuals and SME business owners, with an aim to build a loan book of around £260m by the end of 2019.

Its target customers “may be asset-rich but regular income-poor, usually find it difficult to pass the high-street banks’ lending criteria, as most banks only accept regular and established forms of payments as ‘income’.”

OakNorth has hired Kevin Appleton, Matthew McDonald and Mark Howell, previously of the Financial Ombudsman Service, Coutts and the Bank of Ireland respectively, as their first mortgage advisers.

Their first offering will be lifetime variable rate tracker mortgages, either with or without early repayment charges.

“By leveraging our experience in creating tailored loans for businesses, we can plug this gap and provide our growing portfolio of property investors and developers with mortgage solutions that are attractive, quick, convenient and easy to use,” said Ben Barbanel, OakNorth’s Head of Debt Finance.

In recent weeks OakNorth signed its first partnership with Monzo, offering its personal savings accounts to Monzo’s 1.5m customers.

In February OakNorth became the UK’s most-valuable fintech with a price tag of $2.8bn after SoftBank led a $440m investment round in the business.