Hi I’m Bryce Glover and I’m Divisional Director for Nationwide Commercial.

Now, if you’ve done any research about Nationwide, you’ll know we’re the largest building society in the UK and that we have over 16 million members. And you’ll also know that we’re famous for our personal financial services products. Perhaps what you won’t know as well is that our brand also includes the Commercial division, and that’s fairly substantial in itself. We’ve got nearly £21 billion worth of assets under management, and they’re spread across three sectors.

The first of those sectors is commercial property. We’ve been involved in commercial property since the early 1990s and we’ve built up a great deal of experience. We lend on a variety of assets – we lend on industrial parks, we lend on retail parks, we lend on the High Street. Mainly to investment borrowers, but they could be in the leisure sectors and also for residential lending.

The second area that we’re in is social housing. And by social housing what I mean is lending to registered social landlords, and we have about 300 of those on our books. We’ve been doing this for some considerable time – in fact, we’ve been doing it for over 50 years. It’s a very safe area of lending for us, but you have to be up to your game and you have to understand the industry really well. And that’s why we’ve got such a good team.

The third area is PFI, and UK PFI. For people that don’t know what PFI is, that’s the Private Finance Initiative. Essentially it’s a way of taking off the government’s balance sheet projects which can be financed by the private sector, but underpinned by a revenue stream from the government.  Now that’s a more recent business for us, and we’ve built the book up to about £2 billion.

So those are the three existing businesses we’ve got, but our ambition doesn’t stop there. We’re currently launching commercial deposits. And what do I mean by commercial deposits?  Well that’s savings for businesses and for corporates. Strangely, we’ve not been a big player in this market before, but it’s something we really want to develop over the next couple of years.

But even then, we’ve got more ambition. We want to take the Commercial division and have a good look at the SME market, and see whether we can play in the SME sector as a real challenger to the existing banks’ operating there. 

So that’s the businesses – a combination of good existing businesses, and then the potential for the new businesses going forward.

I suppose an obvious question is, what qualities and skills are we looking for? Well, the truthful answer is an absolute variety. If I look at the team I have now, they come from retail parts of the society; they have come from the external world from different types of businesses. The thing I’m looking for to be absolutely honest about it, is I’m looking for some passion and fire in their belly. I’m looking for experience of different types of industries, so that we don’t become too single-minded. And I’m looking for people who will work hard, but also work hard within a team.

Now if you come and join Nationwide, what will it be like? Well I’ll tell you what it will be like. There will be plenty of opportunities and plenty of challenges. We’ll give you fantastic training in Nationwide Commercial, because we really pride ourselves on that. And we’ll give you plenty of work to do, with diversity of work, and probably you’ll never be doing the same thing two days running, but what we can give you is career opportunity. We can demonstrate that over recent years by the number of people who’ve taken on new challenges. I’ll also promise you this – there will be times when you’ll work very hard, but we’ll have some fun along the way. And all the time we’re working to the same objective – and that’s to build a bigger, broader and stronger commercial division for Nationwide.