January 2018
By Jordan McBriar, FIBA Executive Committee member and Director at Adapt Finance
Being asked to write the first newsletter for FIBA is truly a great honour for Adapt Finance and for me personally.
The Financial Intermediary & Broker Association – or FIBA – has been tasked to implement a self-created mission statement which is:
To support finance professionals within the UK, enabling them to deliver outstanding solutions and service to their clients, whilst meeting their regulatory obligations.
So, you may ask and wonder: can this be achieved? Has this been executed before and, more importantly, how can we continue to improve on what’s been accomplished thus far?
The answer is yes. It can, it has, and it will continue to, if the Executive Committee – with the support of the Lender Committee – abide by not only the mission statement but by our objectives, too.
Breaking down the three aforementioned questions, the first and third do depend heavily on time and hindsight. As much as we believe in FIBA, we may need to start with question two: has this been achieved before?
In short, yes – and we at Adapt can fully attest to that.
Adapt is still a small friends and family business based in Manchester which completes over £100m of short-term and development finance each year. But this wasn’t always the case. When we first launched in 2014 we had a small group of clients, few lenders knew us and our product knowledge wasn’t as good as it could have been.
We took an opportunity and decided to join the AOBP as a Silver Associate to try to propel our ‘status’ and ‘name’, but more pertinently to further advance our knowledge and reputation so that we could continue to deliver the service levels that our clients had come to expect.
So, why now FIBA and not the AOBP? To use a football analogy, in 1992 a group of teams broke away from the Football League to create the Premier League which promised further investment and a larger platform to promote ‘The Beautiful Game’ – and it really did make a difference.
Granted, there isn’t the lucrative TV rights for us, but at FIBA we have supporters who have invested in our beliefs and have seen that there is potential to really make a difference to our partners and members.
In conclusion, I can happily sit here and say that in three and a half years, Adapt has completed over £320m of finance with a target to surpass half a billion by the end of 2018. FIBA will continue to be a huge part of our development which this year will see new ventures and offerings coming to market. The Association will continue to support us on our journey and now I am lucky enough to be able to support other partners and members to strive to achieve whatever it is they endeavour to be.