RBS planning major push into mortgage lending in bid to grab a 20 per cent share of market

By ALEX HAWKES, FINANCIAL MAIL ON SUNDAY

Updated: 05:22 EST, 30 June 2014

Royal Bank of Scotland is planning a major push into mortgage lending in a bid to grab a 20 per cent share of the market, it revealed on Friday.

The bank will double the number of its mortgage advisers to 800 this year as part of efforts to reach what it called its ‘natural share’ of the home loans business.

Plans: The bank will double the number of its mortgage advisers to 800 this year

Almost 20 per cent of bank customers are clients of NatWest or RBS, it said. It has a 12 per cent share of new mortgage approvals.

The Bank of England’s new rule, imposed last week, that a maximum of 15 per cent of any bank’s loans are at an income multiple of more than 4.5 ‘will not affect our appetite to grow’, said Moray McDonald, RBS’s head of personal and business banking products.

‘The 15 per cent cap is very unlikely to check our growth,’ he told city analysts.

Nine per cent of RBS’s mortgages are at income multiples of more than 4.5 times salary, with 12 per cent of its London lending over the multiple compared with a market average in the capital of 19 per cent.