January saw Foundation (previously Foundation Home Loans) undergo a comprehensive rebrand, adopting a new name as well as making major changes to its logo and website.
BTL Insider spoke with the lender’s director of sales, Grant Hendry (pictured above), and its director of marketing, Georgie Atkin-Park, about how the firm’s new look represents its path forward in an evolving specialist finance market.
For Grant and Georgie, a rebrand was inevitable when looking at the trajectory of the company as well as the ever-changing BTL market.
“I think the BTL market has really professionalised and so have we. We've done it together, we're evolving together, and that is really important. We're on this journey collectively and I’m really proud of that,” said Georgie.
Changing the firm’s name from Foundation Home Loans to simply Foundation may seem simple, but it reflects both the changing nature of borrowers and the evolving BTL market, according to Grant.
“The specialist market has evolved constantly,” he said. “It's become a lot more professional. On the specialist residential side, customers’ circumstances have changed and we've had to be able to adapt to their needs and requirements.
“From a brand perspective, keeping that word ‘foundation’ is fundamental, because that is what we're built on, those foundations.”
In consulting stakeholder contacts and the wider market, the team at Foundation wanted to make the rebrand a collaborative effort, including both the name and the logo change.
The firm’s logo is now formed of three green and blue blocks, with the name underneath. Meanwhile, the new ‘making mortgages happen’ tagline reflects what Georgie calls “the pride, the excitement, the enthusiasm of our people”.
For Georgie, the firm’s new logo has three key elements: “Number one is foundations, building blocks. There's also the way that the logo signifies growth, a sort of a trajectory. And the other thing that for me is really special is if you turn it ever so slightly, you see an F.”
The design and layout of the website, which will often be the first point of contact with the lender, have also been reworked.
Adjusting and refreshing what Grant saw as a dated system, the firm has de-segmented the financing disciplines from their previous colour schemes and instead placed them all under the same dark blue banner, while adding pictures of Foundation staff to bring the human element to the forefront.
One of the key reasons for the website overhaul was to allow easier addition of new products to the site, while also creating both transparency and a clear sense of the firm’s direction of travel in the eyes of its broker partners.
Georgie too appreciated the contrast between the old website and its post-makeover version, noting that Foundation’s online presence should represent it as a company that was easy to work with.
“If I'm being really honest, I didn't think our website reflected that. I found the website complicated and it wasn't easy to find what you were looking for. That felt at odds with how we act, how we behave [and] what people say about us.”
However, the rebrand is not just a way for the firm to show its own changes but also to adapt to what both Grant and Georgie see as a changing BTL market. Grant explained that policy updates such as the Renters’ Rights Bill have meant the lender must ensure it was at the forefront of fulfilling customer and landlord needs and requirements, alongside FCA customer care requirements.
“The ability for people to buy is becoming harder. And what we need to make sure we are doing is working in the correct way through consumer duty and everything else, but enabling that ability for people to be able to get onto the ladder,” Grant continued. “That's an exciting place to be in.”
Grant said that Foundation found itself in the middle of two key groups: “ You’ve got people who are trying to get on the ladder and you've got landlords who are buying property, and we're kind of sat there in the middle, enabling both people to achieve what they need to.
“There are people who want to rent and there are people that want to own, and we have to be able to accommodate both of those sides.”
With Foundation armed with a new look in an ever-changing BTL market, Georgie was confident that the company was set to weather the developments that were on the path forward.
“We’ve got brilliant, brilliant people and we've got big plans, and we're really excited about what's to come. And I think, for us, the rebrand was a step on that journey.”
