Last week, Masthaven celebrated its first anniversary as a retail bank.

It reported strong lending figures over the past year with 377 bridging loan applications being completed at £122.4m.

Meanwhile, a further £22.5m of development finance was lent to 70 SME housebuilders.

Jon Hall, managing director at Masthaven (pictured above), spoke exclusively to Specialist Banking to explain how its operations had changed since becoming a bank.

“It's been fascinating to watch the challenger space grow with new entrants during 2017; collectively, we're gradually shaking up the sector as we each bring something fresh and different.

“It's an incredibly vibrant space to work in.

“I think the move to open banking has [the] potential to increase the collaboration between new entrants and also means we have the opportunity to get even closer to our customers whether savers, borrowers or intermediaries.”

Jon said the transition to becoming a bank had enabled it to offer a powerful range of lending solutions.

“All divisions have seen strong performance, but I've been particularly impressed by the success of our mortgage business.

“For first and second charge mortgages: £425m of mortgage decision in principles received; 1,239 applications with a value of £148.3m and 509 completions.”

Masthaven has raised over £250m in retail deposits over the past 12 months as it welcomed new customers to the bank.

The specialist bank also revealed that it would be introducing new savings solutions to help business customers as well as retail users.

“We're delighted that we have successfully managed to blend digital with great human skills to deliver our own style of best-in-class service,” added Jon.

“This is played out in the feedback from our satisfied customers.

“We take their comments seriously, and make it transparent and available on our website.

“Our customers say they like what we do and we're getting it right.

“We're immensely proud of this feedback and an average Feefo score of 4.6/5 for our service.

“I'd like to thank all our customers for choosing to bank with Masthaven, and our intermediary partners for supporting us during the past 12 months.”