He continued: “I see what it’s like for my peers and my colleagues, other families. It doesn’t take a lot to see you live in a society where more people own their homes outright than own homes with a mortgage. Now, clearly there’s an ageing population in this country, but put all that to one side, that just doesn’t feel right. There is clearly a problem with home ownership – we have a huge problem coming up if we don’t fix this. I remember, renting a flat in a big block where you’re living on top of each other and you don’t really know your neighbours, you don’t really get involved, there’s not really that community – whereas you buy your house, you know your neighbours, you’re invested in the community, you know what’s going on around you. So, I can see all of those things. I can see the intrinsic value of home ownership – I appreciate it. There’s lots we can do about this as an industry.”
Read more: ‘BoE policy denies hundreds of thousands of first-time buyers their own homes’
How the pandemic prompted a career change
Now it’s McClelland’s task to lead Gen H, having taken over from its founder Will Rice, who sought a reset and has stepped down to become a non-executive director. None of it might have happened, but for COVID – and a time of reflection for McClelland, away from the energy of the City work environment he knew. “It’s one of those careers that requires a lot of you,” he explained. “I’d always promised myself, if the next two years looked like the last two years it was time for change. Maybe I’d reached my ceiling, maybe I just wasn’t going to go any further up the tree. Investment banking is quite a social pursuit, so when you’re all remote, working from home, maybe it’s ‘the Emperor’s got no clothes’ type of moment. I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore, and that left me with a window to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to do something that was with an early stage, growth tech business, focused around the consumer and ideally doing something that I thought of as a good thing – something I could get pumped up about. It was a very conscious decision.”
A meeting with Rice, where they clicked straight away, led to McClelland effectively taking a pay cut and joining Gen H as its chief commercial officer, to run the funding side of the business, then latterly as chief financial officer, paving the way for his recent promotion to top position. When he joined, the lender, based in London’s Old Street, had around 30 people in its team – now it’s closer to 75. “Will had got the first piece of funding in place but that was it,” McClelland said. “There wasn’t revenue in the business, it wasn’t really fit for purpose, so I came in to do that. What attracted me was the people – we’ve got some fantastic people who are all a contrast from investment banking. They are driven by the purpose of how do you create incremental homeowners or, I guess to put it better, when a house is for sale, how do we ensure that that a house goes to someone who wants to own the home, live in the home, be part of the community rather than an overseas landlord, second properties, buy-to-let, holiday let, all that sort of stuff? So, what do we do to empower that marginal buyer? We exist to give people a better chance of owning the home that they want to own, and we do a lot around responsible affordability.
“What we do really well, is helping those who don’t have that vanilla income profile. Quite often it’s people who have two jobs, some employed income, some self-employed income and the big high street lenders don’t really want that business. There is a growing, sizeable minority that have a more complicated set of circumstances and I think we do a really good job of capturing those type of customers and being able to lend to them, probably more than they could get elsewhere, but doing it responsibly.”
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