This is your second year in a row being recognised as Servicer of the Year. What key achievements or developments have driven that recognition?
We’re delighted to have been recognised by our clients and our peers for the second year running. We started with three people in a room and we’re now at €75bn AUM, across five markets, with more than 2,000 people. We’ve always had a deeply client-centric mindset, no matter our size, which is central to our operating model.
From an organisational perspective, we were sold from KKR to J.C. Flowers, which was a meaningful change in our shareholder structure and evolved our strategic ambition. One way you see this is our recent acquisition of Computershare’s UK mortgage servicing business. That takes our overall AUM to over €75bn and increases our headcount. We’ve also continued to invest very heavily in our proprietary technology platform and associated data and analytics capabilities. We’re looking to bring more products to market in the coming months and years.
We’ve also expanded our client base quite dramatically across asset classes, geographies and the type of services we provide. Our growth reflects the evolution of the capital markets, the growth in demand for our services — particularly among institutional investors in private credit — combined with our technology-enabled capabilities.
Ultimately, I think our recognition comes down to an absolute focus on the customer and delivering the best service for them and for our clients, as well as our strategic ambition to become the market-leading technology-enabled credit servicing platform globally.
How has your servicing platform evolved to meet the needs of originators and investors across different European markets?
We’ve worked incredibly hard to ensure that our clients, irrespective of the market they operate in, get a seamless experience. We seek to bring our experience from one market into another, particularly where there’s a product niche or client experience we can leverage.
We have a very clear portfolio management framework that we operate across all markets. It’s highly quantitative and bottom-up, and it underpins how we drive portfolio-level servicing strategies. We call it our GIP—growth inflation policy—framework, and it’s consistent across markets.
We also seek to deliver commercials, legal structures and pricing in a consistent way where possible, while still reflecting local market dynamics. Overall, we aim to provide a coherent experience across the business, tailored to each market.
How have securitisation and credit markets evolved over the past year, and what has that meant for demand for servicing?
We’ve seen the securitisation markets remain incredibly robust, with strong investor demand over the last 12 months. There are always pockets of rate-driven or performance-driven challenges, but overall the European securitisation market has been very healthy.
We’ve seen growing appetite for more specialised product niches. Second-charge is now well established, but we’re also seeing strong interest in products like equity release and home equity lines of credit. There’s more aggregation of portfolios originated by different originators and then securitised together. That’s particularly notable in Spain, where we’ve played a significant role through our ability to aggregate data across originators.
The biggest change, however, has been in the last eight weeks following the Market Financial Solutions issue in the UK. Historically, backup servicing was treated as an afterthought. We largely stayed away from it unless there was a clear relationship-driven need. What we’ve seen recently is a surge in demand—not just for backup servicing, but for a broader set of independent, third-party, well-governed solutions across the credit chain. We’ve been inundated with demand from institutional investors, senior lenders and risk desks, and have launched a new Strategic Servicing offering to help.
How are data, analytics and technology shaping your servicing model?
We’re now well into developing our proprietary credit technology platform, PRISM. We’ve long believed there’s a material technology deficit in this market, particularly given increasingly intensive regulatory requirements around borrower outcomes and vulnerable customers. We felt it was essential to own our software platform rather than outsource it. We now have around £3bn on the platform across 12 clients and approximately 15,000 individual loans. PRISM was soft-launched last year and is already driving significant efficiencies and improved outcomes for clients.
Our ambition over the next three years is to migrate our €75bn AUM onto the platform. We’re also beginning to use AI tooling to drive operational efficiency and speed our product development. Additionally, as the system of record for these portfolios, how we use data is critical. We’re investing heavily in both reporting capabilities and in using data to drive proactive servicing strategies and advanced predictive analytics.
Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities in European credit and securitisation?
There’s real innovation happening on the asset side, and that will continue as long as capital is available. However, it needs to be matched by appropriate operational resilience within securitisation structures. We are seeing the importance of that now and expect significant evolution in that space.
You also can’t separate the future of European credit markets from the impact of technology, AI and analytics. That will be one of the biggest structural shifts, affecting everything from origination and underwriting through to funding, servicing and portfolio management. We’re at a very interesting point in the market, and it’s an exciting time.