Link Mortgage Services are a specialist third party servicer of mortgage loans now owned by Link Group PTY. The business employs some 190 staff servicing a range of residential, commercial and housing association loans for a number of client banks, investors and hedge funds.
Mark Davies is a Chartered Accountant by qualification and has worked in Retail Financial Services and the Lending Industry specifically since leaving KPMG in 1994.
Prior to joining Link Mortgage Services in 2015, Mark has been an Interim Manager, completing long term assignments as Head of Finance for Hermes Fund Managers Limited and The UK Debt Management Office, where he was actively engaged on supporting the Debt Guarantee programmes launched by the UK Government at the height of the credit crisis. In 2007 Mark was part of the Executive Team that successfully built and launched a specialist SME lender for AnaCap, the private equity investors, and which was used as part of the operational platform to create the new challenger bank, Aldermore early in 2010. Prior to that, Mark was Finance Director of Rooftop Mortgages Limited and was also Director of Group Finance for the Spicerhaart Group for 5 years from 2000.
Married to Helen with 3 children who have now all left school, Mark lives and works in Suffolk. He considers himself a proud bowel cancer survivor who still plays competitive club and over 50’s hockey and, under duress, has completed 3 half marathons since his treatment was successfully completed in 2014.
Q: What was your first job and what is the worst job you’ve ever done?
Manually manufacturing wall cladding tiles in a farm outbuilding in Rutland when I was 16 or 17. No health and safety in those days and very little quality control as it got in the way of production volumes on which we were paid! The worst job was hand cleaning the inside of an empty swimming pool in the summer Florida heat with some noxious chemicals that are no doubt banned now.
Q: Was finance your first career choice and what were you doing before?
Nope I spent over 2 of my 3 years at Durham not wanting to follow the family accountancy line. But Geography wasn’t going to meet my income aspirations and in the end I figured out that the professional firms would effectively pay me to learn about business, study and to get a qualification – if I worked hard along the way and kept my nose clean!
Q: Why did you choose a career in the real estate/mortgage lending sector?
I guess the lending industry found me, really, it certainly wasn’t a planned career path! As an auditor I always ended up on the asset side of the balance sheet, spells in insolvency in the early nineties and corporate finance after that brought me wider skills and perspective – good and bad, and from that the rest followed. I have had two spells in loan servicing (residential and commercial),exposure to the capital markets and structured finance, estate agency, property valuation and mortgage broking culminating in me be asked to build a lender for a PE firm, just as the credit crisis broke.
Q: Why do you enjoy the sector?