Craig Valente-Wallis, Self-employed Mortgage and Protection Adviser talks us through his role in detail from his initial background in previous roles to what its like to be a self-employed mortgage adviser, along with giving some words of wisdom for anyone considering the role.
I’m Craig Valente-Wallace, a Mortgage and Protection Adviser at Tenet Financial Services.
My job is centred around problem solving in order to find my clients the most suitable and cost-effective product/s for their individual circumstances. I help clients buy their dream home; I help landlords increase their portfolios, and most importantly, I help
My previous roles include managing a property portfolio whilst playing professional squash for Scotland. I have always had a keen interest in the property market, and through my experiences of working with portfolio managers in my early career, I felt a lot of my clients received poor service levels from their brokers and for the most part, the advice was poor. These experiences piqued my interest to explore the qualifications required to practice mortgage & protection advice.
The route I followed was the CeMAP exam, which is awarded by the London Institute of Banking and Finance (LIBF). However, there are other award bodies offering mortgage advice qualifications.
I found the process was clearly explained on their website, with the course featuring three multiple choice exams. The most appealing factor to me was the flexibility of the exams, as they can be taken at any point after you have registered. This meant that I could fit the exams around work, and didn’t need to take any time off to study. For me, the process took about 12 months to complete. However, as you have flexibility with the exams, the qualification can be achieved in a much shorter or longer period.
Within Financial Services, however, it is hard to get your foot in the door. When I was researching adviser positions, I found many advertised online, yet very few would accept applicants without experience (usually at least two years) or without having previously been signed off with Competent Adviser Status (CAS) in a previous role. My career up until this point has included roles such as Protection Advisor, Trainee Mortgage Adviser, and Mortgage Account Manager. Most recently, I completed the Mentor to CAS program with Tenet.
My day-to-day tasks include a lot of initial client meetings and fact-finding calls. I spend a lot of time researching appropriate solutions for my clients and making sure these are affordable for their current circumstances. I also spend time preparing for meetings, making notes, and presenting solutions to my clients. There are a lot of rewarding elements to the role, including helping people buy their dream home and giving them peace of mind knowing the debt is protected.
One of my favourite parts of being a self-employed mortgage adviser is the amount of flexibility it provides. Due to the nature of the job, getting clients to the decision-in-principle stage then waiting to have offers accepted can take anything from one week to several months. This allows you to focus on growing your business whilst simultaneously not taking time away from existing clients. The job is also very flexible in the sense that I can choose my own working hours and manage my own calendar.
There are also some downsides, especially when speaking to clients who want to buy a property but don’t have the affordability due to their personal and financial circumstances. That being said, having the ability to build strong rapport and manage expectations with clients from the start is a key element to maintaining strong relationships with my clients. So as much as clients would like to take out a mortgage, they aren’t always able to proceed. Therefore, maintaining a relationship and helping them with a plan to get to a position to proceed in the future is crucial to the role.
Other key skills include good time management, as normally you will be balancing several clients at once who are all at various stages in the mortgage process, and it is important for you to be accessible to your clients and provide them with regular updates.
In the real world, a lot of my day is taken up with chasing clients for relevant documents and chasing lenders for updates on the applications. This is not the most fun part of the role, but it is important to give people a nudge to keep the process moving.
Some clients are really on the ball with providing information and documents, sometimes even on the same day. However, some clients you can be chasing for weeks for information needed to proceed with the application. The same can be said for lenders, some will issue offers within a matter of hours of submission, while others will take several weeks.
For people who don’t come from a financial-services background looking to become an adviser, my best piece of advice is to be prepared to accept any role within financial services as a starting point.
It is extremely unlikely that you will walk into a trainee advising role with no experience. Another important consideration is to ask what network the company uses.
Speaking from personal experience, I have used four different networks, and some are extremely user friendly and some not so much. I would also recommend, asking to speak to a current adviser with a company before accepting a position as this will help give you an internal insight into what it is like working there.
Lastly, if you are transitioning into a self-employed role, I would recommend having a minimum of six-months’ salary built up to live on. This is because at the beginning of becoming self-employed, your earnings will fluctuate as you build and grow your client bank.
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Read another inspirational article ‘A Day in the Life of a Mortgage and Protection Adviser’.
