In October, Vida Bank reported a 111% jump in its gross lending book to £348m in H1 2025. BTL Insider spoke with CEO Anth Mooney (pictured above) about the drivers behind the growth, the impact of its banking licence, and plans to challenge the sector’s largest players.
In Vida Bank’s interim results, pre-tax profits for H1 stood at £10.7m, up £8.8m from the same time last year and well ahead of the £3.6m recorded in 2024’s full-year profits. Much of its progress follows the granting of a full banking licence, which CEO Anth Mooney described as the firm’s ‘take-off moment’.
“It’s taken a huge amount of time and effort to get here, but we're now at a point where we can really feel that we're hitting our stride [and] seeing the benefit of that hard work,” said Anth.
While overall lending books rose, so too did BTL lending volume. Anth shared that the firm’s BTL lending had increased by just over 100% from H1 2024, despite the ratio between BTL and residential shifting from around 70/30 last year to roughly 50/50 in H1 2025.
“We've got a very clear focus on first-time landlords, limited companies, [and] expats, and we've seen really strong growth when we look at more complex property types,” he explained.
“Over the last two or three years, we've seen really strong growth in HMOs, MUBs, and high-rise flats… I think that's largely driven by landlords looking to restructure their portfolios as they search for improved yields.”
The company has also expanded its BTL offering, recently releasing a holiday lets proposition. It is also gearing up for a series of new products that it plans to release over the coming 18 months and beyond.
These new products will contribute to the firm’s lending targets over the next year. These include reaching applications worth around £3-3.5bn and hitting £1.5bn worth of completions — a large increase from the £900m that Anth anticipated Vida would complete by the end of this year.
“We have a very strong pipeline. We've got £600m of loans already in our pipeline as we head towards the year end, so we know that we're going to get off to a really strong start next year.”
For Anth, hitting some of these targets would propel the company into the leagues of some of the industry’s biggest names.
“If we're originating £3-3.5bn of applications next year, that's going to make us a top three, top four player in the specialist space, so we will be hot on the heels of the likes of Kensington, Paragon, OSB, and others.”
Much of Vida Bank’s growth, Anth said, was powered by a decade of data and insight, which informed its risk appetite and credit decisions.
The bank is now introducing a new originations system, having removed the BDM role two years ago; the traditional roaming position is now redundant, suggested Anth. Along with other elements such as operating engines and the firm's banking licence, he anticipated this woukd allow Vida to compete more effectively.
With the banking licence in place, Anth explained that Vida now had the confidence and retail funding to compete with larger lenders and scale over the next two to three years.
He noted that as the firm grew over the past few years, it had built an experienced team. With access to more funding and greater competitive strength, he saw notable change not just in the H1 figures but across the business.
“If I compare the business today to where we were five years ago, it's a completely different business. That transition from non-bank to bank is a big deal in terms of getting us ready to compete at greater scale.”
