NEWS

Kensington Mortgages Update On COVID-19

 

Given the extraordinary situation, we  thought it was important to inform you that Kensington’s lending and servicing businesses continue to operate as usual; We continue to originate new residential and buy-to-let loans and to support our existing mortgage customers through this crisis.

The health and safety of our employees remains our top priority and we are complying with all UK government requirements and guidelines in relation to our workforce, offices and data centres. As the number of cases continues to escalate throughout the UK, we are closely monitoring the situation and taking all appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure that staff can be as protected as possible. Following the new guidelines the majority of our workforce are now working from home.

While we do not anticipate this resulting in disruption to our servicing capability, we are currently experiencing very high call volumes into our Servicing centre which is impacting our response times to certain requests. We are working with customers to offer a range of possible solutions to meet their needs. This includes payment holidays where customers have suffered a loss of income as well as temporarily waiving arrears management fees and stopping any repossession proceedings for 3 months. As a specialist lender, we always look to treat our customers fairly and with respect, and assess each case individually to ensure we can find the best solution for that customer’s specific circumstances.

The nature of our business means that we have well proven policies and procedures already in place that deal with sick leave, absence and operational resilience. We are clear on which of our activities are the most time critical and, where necessary, we will prioritise these to minimise the risk of any customer being disadvantaged in the event of high staff absences.

From a financial perspective, Kensington has enough cash through its balance sheet and its private warehouse to originate over £1 billion of assets from where we are today. As a reminder, we raised £650 million through the securitisation market (Finsbury Square 2020-1) at the end of February that included c. £160 million of prefunding.

We are happy to organise calls at your convenience if you have any questions / concerns, please get in touch via the contact us page.

We are tracking the latest government advice and Kensington’s policies and plans will be reviewed and updated if and when the situation in the UK changes.