Mortgage Underwriter in Sunderland

We’re Perenna, a digital mortgage bank that will revolutionise the UK mortgage market. We offer flexible fixed rate mortgages, with terms ranging from 15 years up to 40 years, providing full payment certainty and protecting borrowers against interest rate rises.

Underwriters play a pivotal role in our underwriting team. They make credit decisions outside of standard policy guidelines and within board approved risk appetite and use their judgement to identify and address key risk indicators on mortgage applications. Joining us as a Mortgage Underwriter, you’ll also have the chance to help us improve our processes and ways of working as we scale.

Here’s what you’ll do:

• Mortgage Underwriting – you’ll underwrite applications, ensuring robust assessment, highlighting key concerns, challenging proportionately and providing suitable mitigations in the decision-making process to ensure we deliver a high quality and efficient service. You’ll own the accurate and timely underwriting assessment of all mortgage cases within your delegated authority, making meaningful decisions in a timely manner. You’ll also need to be alert to signs of suspicious or fraudulent activity and be able to escalate appropriately to obtain a suitable resolution, keeping the bank safe from fraud exposure.
• Process Improvement – you’ll play an active role in process improvement and problem solving, working collaboratively with the wider Originations and Underwriting teams to tackle new challenges as work through our launch and go live.
• Collaboration and teamwork – you’ll be sharing your knowledge and experience to continuously improve our ways of working and supporting the wider team whenever it’s needed as we scale up through our early stages of operations.

Your skills and experience:

We’re looking for people who share a passion for our mission, to change the way that mortgages work for people in the UK, and who want to be part of an early-stage company as we build our offering. These are the skills and experiences you could bring to Perenna that would make a great impact:

• Strong expertise in mortgage underwriting – we’re looking for a highly knowledgeable and skilled underwriter, who has gained experience in a similar role focussed on underwriting residential mortgage products. You should have ideally held a lending mandate within the last 3 years, and come with deep knowledge of credit decisioning techniques, evidenced good quality outputs and good arrears performance on decisions made. We’re also open to applicants who might not have quite as much underwriting experience, but come with extensive lending specialist experience.
• Proven experience in mortgage related regulation – you’ll come from an FCA regulated environment, and you’ll demonstrate an understanding of MCOB, KYC, the Consumer Duty and Fraud & Financial Crime practices.
• Effective and authentic communication capability – you’ll need to be able to deal with customers, 3rd parties and colleagues around the business in a clear, authentic and engaging way. You should be able to build a trustful rapport easily and show your ability to listen well.

We are positive, energetic, and focussed as a team, and we enjoy finding pragmatic ways to do new things that change the status quo. We value transparency and collaboration, and we like to own outcomes but share successes. If these are the kind of behaviours that you value in your colleagues, you will enjoy the pace and style of work we do here. It’s a dynamic place to work.

Rewards & Benefits at Perenna:

We are still a young company raising capital through investment, so we haven’t finished adding to our benefits package yet. We decided to prioritise the most important things for our people first, a good salary, a generous pension and excellent life and health benefits. Here’s what’s on offer:

• A competitive basic salary
• 30 days of annual leave, with Public Holidays on top.
• 10% company contribution to your pension (you put in 5%)
• Fully comprehensive private healthcare cover for you and your family. Our plan includes cancer cover and mental healthcare, access to a GP 24/7 and additional wellbeing benefits. You pay no contributions to any healthcare cover, just tax on the benefit in kind through payroll each month (no P11Ds to worry about).
• Security for life events through our Income Protection Scheme (if you’re incapacitated and can’t work) and our Life Assurance Plan (worth 8 times your salary).
• We offer support through our confidential Employee Assistance Programmes whenever you need it, and access to fully trained Mental Health First Aiders across the company.
• Commitment to your development, with access to funded training and learning opportunities to support your growth and access to thousands of free to use courses through our on-demand learning platform.
• EV leasing scheme

Our roles are hybrid. This means although we don’t expect you to be in the office every day, there are some things that are just better done together – in-person team training, collaborating on new processes and improvement to how we do things, informal chats and in-person get togethers to explore new things or get a wider perspective on what’s going on. You agree the balance with your manager between working at home and at the office that best enables efficiency, connection and collaboration.

Things you should know:

Our selection processes are quick, but thorough. After a short initial chat to get some extra information about you, you'll have 2 more structured interviews, but we won’t hang around, and if you aren’t successful, we’ll make sure you get feedback. We're a regulated bank, so if you’re successful, our pre-employment process will include ID verification, a DBS records check, adverse credit checks (not scoring) and employment history referencing before your start date is confirmed. All applicants need to be fully eligible to work in the UK without any restrictions. We can't support Visa sponsorship.

Things that matter to us all:

The fantastic people we have here at Perenna come from a very wide range of backgrounds and communities, but we all share the same belief that mortgages should be better, and we all want to make that happen together. We’re passionate and proud of our unique proposition, our products and our mission. We collaborate and we support each other, and our culture is inclusive and open. Diversity of all kinds is valued and respected here, and whatever your background, your voice will be heard. That’s not just because it’s the right thing to do – we believe our diversity makes us better for our customers and helps us think big about our goals. If you need any accommodation or adjustment to participate in our selection process, please let us know, and we’ll make it happen.