Thanks for your time today and the opportunity for us to present our results for FY 2022. We'll initially run through a presentation deck, which will take about half an hour, as Andy said, and then we'll have the opportunity for Q&A. I'll start by providing a brief overview of the results and what we've been up to over the course of the year, what we've delivered, and then Michael will take over, present our financial performance before I pick up and talk through the outlook. For our first full year of results, I'm delighted to present a strong financial performance.
Over the year, as you can see on this slide, we've delivered an 18% increase in funds under management, with the main drivers being our third securitization, which we completed in June for GBP 280 million, a new GBP 150 million financial partnership with HSBC and Barclays, which were completed in July, an upsizing of our separate account with JP Morgan, which we completed in September to GBP 725 million. We delivered a 36% increase in our assets under management, driven by strong growth in our buy-to-let lending. These are long-term loans, so we're delivering realizing revenue that will support our business for years to come. We delivered a 21% increase in revenue.
What we're most pleased about is with the operating leverage from our technology platform, we're delivering exceptional growth in our profit, with EBITDA up 90% and PBT up 190% to GBP 14.2 million. Our business is highly cash generative, and we're confident about our growth prospects, so we're delighted to be in a position to recommend a maiden dividend of GBP 0.044 per share, and going forward, recommend an intention to maintain a progressive dividend policy. For those of you less familiar with our business, LendInvest is an asset management platform focused on property finance. We have a proprietary technology platform that makes it simple for investors to gain exposure to property finance, a market which is hard for them to access.
For borrowers and brokers, they can easily access our mortgage products that are tailored to work for them. We're providing landlords, property developers and homeowners with buy-to-let development and bridging loans. On the other side of our platform, we've got a diverse and global investor base, including investing into our loans, and that includes some of the world's largest institutional investors and financial institutions. We're regulated as an asset manager. We have around 250 people in our business. About a third of our employees are software engineers, product people, data scientists building out our technology. At IPO, we said we were raising capital to invest in our technology infrastructure and that we would grow and optimize our funds under management, expand our platform assets under management. Over the last 12 months, we've been busy getting that done.
As I briefly mentioned, we've delivered a new GBP 150 million financial partnership with HSBC and Barclays. That had the key aim to improve the energy efficiency of U.K.'s aging housing stock and the product targets customers looking to upgrade the energy efficiency of their buildings to meet Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards. These could affect landlords as early as 2025. There's sort of a real momentum in the market around this upgrade work that's necessary to upgrade buildings over the next few years. The environmental angle was one of the key attractions for Barclays in coming on board as an investor.
With our buy-to-let product performing ahead of plan, we also took the opportunity to strengthen our relationship with JP Morgan by upsizing that separate account by GBP 100 million- GBP 725 million. Through that partnership, we originate and manage a portfolio of buy-to-let mortgages on JP Morgan's behalf, which provides us with fee revenue. We relaunched our regulated bridging product, so that's a product for homeowners between house purchase and sale, and that's ahead of the key launch of our specialist homeowner product. It's a term mortgage product which we intend to launch later this financial year. We launched an innovative EPiC range, providing mortgages to landlords to incentivize them to improve their energy efficiency to C or above, or to purchase a property with a rating of C or above.
That product range was an overwhelming success, driving a 27% increase in our buy-to-let applications. On the technology side, we've increased the size of our technology team by 76% over the year, and we were able to hire these engineers into our business despite the competitive hiring market. They're really attracted to the tech stack they get to work on at LendInvest. That larger technology team is now accelerating the technology roadmap that we have. They successfully launched a new bridging broker portal for us, which led to a 35% increase in our bridging loan applications. The key focus of that technology resource now is in delivering this specialist homeowner mortgage product for us. It will initially be targeted toward self-employed people, key workers and professionals. We've accelerated our tech roadmap.
We're launching new products, driving higher loan applications, and we're growing our institutional funder base for our loans. At this point, I'm gonna pass across to Michael to run through the financial performance.
Great. Thank you, Rod. As Rod has set out, we're really, really delighted with the set of results we're bringing out for our first set of listed results.
Our adjusted EBITDA has grown by 90% to GBP 20.3 million, and our profit before tax has grown by 190% to GBP 14.2 million. There's really four key reasons for that change. The first is the growth in our platform AUM, which has grown by 36% since the prior year. That's because of the strength of the buy-to-let product, which has grown by 67% to GBP 1.5 billion over the past year. As our platform assets under management grows, so our revenue grows alongside that. You can see our total income has grown by 21% since the prior year. Now, the growth in platform AUM at 36% is higher than the growth in total income, and that's because of the product mix change that we've had.
Buy-to-let has been incredibly successful over the year, and that's a lower margin, higher volume product which recurs income over a longer period of time. You can see there, the second line down, fee income has grown by 37% since the prior year. That's all to do with the success of the separate account relationship we have with JP Morgan. The second reason then is cost of sales. You can see cost of sales has grown by 9% since the prior year. As Rod pointed out, we closed our third securitization last June. We also brought Barclays and HSBC together in a partnership on the short-term lending. We also renegotiated the terms that we have with Citi and National Australia Bank on the buy-to-let side.
That growth in total income of 21% and the lower cost of sales growth of 9% has increased our gross profit by 32% to just under GBP 50 million. That's also an improvement in our gross profit margin from 52%- 57%. The third driver is our increase in administrative expenses, which has grown at a smaller rate than our gross profit at 21%. Creating and delivering technology with a focus on operational expenditure is something that's really important to the business and something that we focused on in recent years. As we build that technology, it allows us to scale much more efficiently, so not keep adding heads to those processes. The fourth driver is impairment provisions.
Under accounting standards, for every single loan that we hold on our balance sheet, we have to take an impairment provision against it. They're forward-looking provisions based on our expected credit loss over the life of those loans. We have a sophisticated model which brings in macroeconomic data, so things like GDP, house price index forecasts, unemployment, and insolvency, and merges that with the borrower's individual credit file and also data points on the underlying security. Because the macroeconomic picture improved so dramatically over the course of the last year compared to the previous year, with the COVID-19 vaccine being rolled out and a start to return to normality in the U.K. economy, so the macroeconomic inputs into the model improved, and we actually saw a 4% reduction in our impairment provisions to GBP 4.4 million.
Great strength in the profit before tax and growth in adjusted EBITDA, but also improvements in that gross profit margin from 52%- 57%, and also the adjusted EBITDA margin improving from 15%- 23% as well. Now I'd just like to talk a little bit more about the kind of various different revenue streams that we have for the business. If you're familiar with our business at all, we actually have a hybrid model for managing our platforms, platform assets under management. Sometimes we're originating loans and then selling them straight away to a third party, whether it's JP Morgan on the buy-to-let side or to our Luxembourg fund or our investor self-select platform investors on the short-term lending side. Then other times, we're originating those loans, and then we're holding them on our balance sheet.
For those loans which we're originating and then selling to a third party, we're getting fee income. We recognize management fees, servicing fees, and performance fees, and we also will recognize a gain on sale at the time that we sell those to our third parties. For those assets that we're holding on our balance sheet, we're getting interest income, which is the difference between the amount that the borrower is paying to us and what we're paying away to our financial partners, be it Citi, National Australia Bank, HSBC, and Barclays. For each and every single loan that we complete, regardless of whether we hold onto it or whether we subsequently sell it, we're also recognizing an arrangement fee. Now, the great thing about some of these fees is that they're recurring.
Loans that we've completed in the past few years will continue to deliver revenue in the years to come. As we move towards those buy-to-let loans becoming a bigger part of our overall portfolio, so they're generating income over two, five, seven, and now 10 years as well. We can move to the next slide. Thank you. This slide on the left or this chart on the left shows how our platform AUM has increased between short-term lending, which is our bridging and development loans, and buy-to-let. I've already talked about the strength of our buy-to-let, which has increased by 67% over the past year. On the short-term lending side, we've actually seen a small reduction in our short-term lending platform AUM by 5%. There's a couple of factors in that.
The first is that during 2020 and 2021, as a precautionary measure due to COVID, we actually restricted the amount of development lending that we were doing during that time. Over the course of the past year, many of those borrowers that we had before that time have completed their projects, and because of the strength of the property market over that time, they were able to quickly sell those completed developments. That was more pronounced in the first six months of the year, and over the second half of the year, we've seen that level of platform AUM on the short-term lending side steadily increase.
The second reason for it is also that we didn't see short-term lending bounce back as quickly as we expected, and that's largely due to labor shortages and wage and material inflation. We launched a new bridging broker portal right at the end of the calendar year in 2021, and that's really focused on loans of value of less than GBP 3 million. That's been a really great success with our brokers and our borrowers, and it's led to a 35% increase in signed applications on those loans in the last quarter of the year compared to the quarter before. The chart on the right breaks down the total income between interest income, fee income, and that gain on derecognition of financial assets or the gain on sale of assets.
As I mentioned earlier, fee income has grown significantly by 38% because of that real strength in the JP Morgan transaction relationship. On the gain on derecognition of financial assets, it's grown by 12% to GBP 6.5 million, and that's because of a portfolio sale that we made to JP Morgan in September last year. We also made a portfolio sale in the year before that kind of to kick off the whole relationship with JP Morgan. We also on the short-term side sell loans to our Luxembourg fund and investor self-select platform as I mentioned earlier. Okay. As I mentioned, our operational expenditure has increased at a lower rate than our gross profit, and that's all driven by the fact that we're creating technology which drives efficiency.
One of the measures that we use for this in the business is our operational expenditure as a percentage of our platform assets under management. As the business grows, our operational expenditure should grow at a slower rate, so this measure should come down over time. You can see that reflected in the chart on the left here. Over the past three years, this measure has improved from 3.4%- 1.7%, and I'd expect to continue to see more modest improvement in this in the years to come.
Creating this technology drives efficiency for us and allows us to scale, but it's also great for our brokers and our borrowers 'cause it allows them to interact with us more easily to raise new loan applications and also to have much better transparency and visibility throughout the entire process. You can see on that orange line on the chart on the left the number of new brokers that we've had sign up over time, and that is something that we will continue to work on and continue to improve in future years. The launch of this new bridging broker portal has been really important in bringing new brokers to the platform as well because they have new ways to interact with us and better, fantastic new technology to use as well.
This table on the right just breaks down to show some of the actual time improvements that we've had for some of the processes, and this is just a selection of processes where we've seen some improvements. The column on the left shows the time it was taking for various different loan processes before the technology was in place and afterwards. What's really important is that these are all cumulative improvements, so just across these processes alone, that's an 81% saving in the time taken to complete a loan. There's two areas where we're looking to focus on kind of controlling our operational expenditure in the year to come. We're obviously facing, as the rest of the country is, huge amounts of inflation at the moment, and wage inflation is the way that we're really seeing that in our business.
Over the past couple of years, we've moved to a hybrid working environment, and we've hired people across the U.K. and across continental Europe as well. There's just naturally been a concentration of those people in Scotland. We've recently signed a lease for a new office in Glasgow, and that office will be opening up in the next few months. This is just a way for us to continue that look for new hires in Scotland and really help to manage our wage inflation over the coming year. At this point, I'll hand back to Rod.
Thanks, Michael. The tragic events in Ukraine have created global uncertainty and macro headwinds, but we remain confident in our business, the growth prospects that we have in meeting market expectations. We are dealing with now the highest inflation since 1982. Interest rates have risen to the highest point for the last 13 years. Despite this backdrop, the property market has continued to perform very strongly with the growth in average house prices at 9.7% in the year to March 2022. As mortgage rates continue to rise and GDP starts to fall or we go into recession, we expect the house price rate of growth to slow.
Even in the event of declining house prices, we don't expect a material negative impact on our business, and that's because we've got a relatively low loan-to-value across our lending book at about less than 70%. This provides us with some protection against declining house prices. With less pressure from home buyers in a less competitive market, we might actually see the professional landlords and developers that we serve seeing a buying opportunity. That's what we saw in May and June of 2020. In the middle of the COVID crisis, before home buyers got going and sort of created the housing market that we sort of had over the last couple of years, we had professional landlords coming in and seeing the opportunity to buy in a less competitive environment.
Rising interest rates has been a challenge for us and particularly in pricing our buy-to-let products because there's been a lot of volatility in interest rate swaps. In our buy-to-let products we're providing fixed periods of two or five years followed by a variable rate. Our investors want a variable rate on the way through so we use interest rate swaps to turn that fixed rate to a variable rate. The challenge for us has been the volatility in the swap rate and passing that cost on to our borrowers. The strategy of the business is to pass on higher input costs as they come through onto borrowers and that's what we're doing. They're coming through in higher lending rates.
Our higher prices have led to softening of demand, particularly for those two- and five-year products, where some of our competitors haven't been as quick to pass on interest rate rises. Offsetting that, we've launched longer-term fixed rate buy-to-let products, and they're really playing to borrower demand to fix rates for longer given the rising rate environment. We launched a seven-year fixed product back in October of last year and have seen a real demand for that product. We're also seeing strong demand for our short-term lending products, with applications now returned to pre-COVID levels of demand. The diversity of our investor base and of our lending product range is one of the key strengths of our platform.
This, alongside the agility of the platform, allows us to change product mix and develop new products and adjust our risk appetite as market conditions change. It's this agility that really reinforces the resilience of our business. Between the end of March and the 27th of June, so just a few days ago, our funds under management had increased from GBP 2.9 billion- GBP 3.2 billion, and our assets under management had increased from GBP 2.1 billion- GBP 2.3 billion. We remain confident of meeting market expectations. We operate in a huge market, GBP 1.6 trillion market, and that means we can identify different opportunities in these changing market conditions, and that's what allows us to maintain growth.
You can see on the next slide the resilience of our platform in delivering growth through these changing market conditions going back to 2008, the business was originally set up. The performance of our loans has been resilient too. In the COVID crisis, our RMBS pools, so our securitized pools, these are publicly traded pools, so public data available, were among the best performing of any UK mortgage pools. We had the lowest levels of payment deferral rates in the UK buy-to-let sector. That really was testament to the technology we have and also the strength of our team. We're really excited about the opportunities ahead. If you could flick to the next slide, that'd be great. We're excited about the opportunities ahead.
Over the next 24 months and beyond, we'll keep growing our funds under management and our assets under management through new separate accounts and funds. We'll also refinance our bond program. We've recently launched a portfolio buy-to-let product, we've done this in a new separate account partnership with a leading US annuity provider. That product targets buy-to-let borrowers with large portfolios seeking to fix their interest rates for 10 years or more. That product at the moment is really playing to, I suppose, the continued consolidation in the buy-to-let space, where we're seeing the emergence of bigger and bigger portfolio landlords. They're looking to consolidate, lots of mortgages against individual properties into a single mortgage, single loan against a portfolio of properties. At the same time, they want to lock in their interest rates for long periods of time, given the rising rate environment.
This is really translating into good demand at the moment, we expect our first loans to close in the coming months. This really I think shows the agility of our platform to match long-term capital with a specific opportunity that we're seeing in the buy-to-let space at the moment. On the tech side of our platform, once we've launched the specialist homeowner product, which is the main thing the team is focused on at the moment, we've got plans to further improve the experience for our buy-to-let customers. We're gonna do that using some of the technology that we're now building for the homeowner space and bring that across to the buy-to-let space. We've got plans to further improve our machine learning models, our credit, which help us with credit and origination.
As I've mentioned, the key project for our technology team at the moment is our specialist homeowner product. If you flick to the next slide, Andy, that'd be great. Thank you. We're targeting the product, this product to borrowers not well served by high street lenders. We're not referring to customers with an adverse credit history, but those whose income is harder to verify. A large part of this segment is self-employed people, but it could also include key workers or professionals. You know, an interesting group here is doctors, who quite often have multiple sources of income. NHS income plus private income plus other income. We can piece that income together to allow them to borrow through a LendInvest product.
We think this market also has the potential to grow as high street lenders tighten appetite in a weaker environment too. The complexity of this product, the complexity of piecing together all this income is what makes this market ripe for disruption by the technology. The technology that we've built, including using Open Banking technology in the buy-to-let space, forms the basis of our approach here. We're using this sort of Open Banking technology, which will help minimize credit risk and also create operating leverage for us. If we flick onto the next slide, Andy, that'd be great. Thank you. We're really pleased to deliver these strong results. They demonstrate the profitable cash generative nature of our business, and we're confident of continuing to deliver this growth and growth in profits.
We're delighted to recommend our maiden dividend of GBP 0.044 per share, and a progressive dividend policy from here. We're making the recommendation now as the business is cash generative ahead of plan, and we're confident that we've got sufficient cash allocated to our technology projects, our specialist homeowner launch, scaling out buy-to-let. With the cash allocated for these growth projects, we still have cash available for dividend as well. If we flick through to the final slide, that'd be great. Thank you. We're really proud to deliver these financial results. We're particularly proud to have delivered such strong growth in our profitability, demonstrating the efficiencies that we're now generating through our technology platform.
Despite the macro headwinds, we're confident of hitting our market expectations and in delivering these results. We're well on the way to achieving the ambitions that we set out in our IPO. At that, I think that's the main part of the presentation concluded, and we can move on to questions now.
Great. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Very, very clear and, congratulations on, really an exceptional performance. I shall remind viewers that if you want to put questions in, just use the Q&A button, and we have quite a lot already in. Without much further ado, maybe one for you first, Rod. As you mentioned, the GBP 3 billion is a big number, but it's a drop in the ocean in the overall size of the property finance market. Two questions on consolidation. Firstly, does the recent purchase of Kensington have any implications for LendInvest? And then the second one looking forward, is will you continue to focus on organic growth, or might there be opportunities for you to purchase access to either new products or new geographies?
I'll pick up the first bit, first in terms of the Kensington news. As you say, Kensington, which is one of the largest, if not largest non-bank property lender in the U.K., has recently been announced that Barclays will acquire it. That platform's slightly different to ours in that we provide different products. Their key product is actually the specialist residential, specialist homeowner product that we're launching into now. It's sort of they'll become a competitor through time rather than being specifically a key competitor at the moment. I think what it does show that transaction is how much in demand the asset that platforms like ours and Kensington can generate.
You know, Barclays is effectively buying the opportunity to originate loans through that platform on an ongoing basis rather than a back book. I think that's what's really the exciting read across to us is really this continued demand for banks and other investors for the types of loans that we originate and to accessing this space. In terms of the second part of the question, which was I think around geographies and expanding the platform. Is that right, Andy?
Yeah. Will you maintain a focus on organic growth or are there likely to be opportunities in the future to add on products or enter new territories through M&A?
Yeah. The key focus for us at the moment is that organic growth. You see how we're investing in the platform at the moment.
It's not doing too badly at the moment.
Yeah, you know, there's big investment going on at the moment to launch this specialist homeowner product. You know, we see these key products as being really helpful for our growth going forward as well. That's our key focus continues to be organic growth, and the history of the business has been organic growth. You know, there may be opportunities in the sort of medium to longer term where we look at acquisitions. They could as sort of bolt-on territories, countries where actually building business and understanding the sort of local market dynamics from scratch is quite hard work and maybe acquiring businesses in different locations gets going.
The key focus of the business at the moment is that organic growth.
Right. Very clear. Thank you. Michael, one I think for you here. Could you just go into a little bit more detail on how rising interest rates are passed on to your customers? On an overall basis, how do rising interest rates affect LendInvest in terms of cost of lending capital?
Yeah. Rod touched on this a little bit through his presentation earlier or through the presentation earlier. It's the strategy of the business that as our costs start to increase because interest rates start to increase, that we pass those on to the borrower. While that in isolation sounds really straightforward, the challenge is actually that we're in a very competitive marketplace, so we can't necessarily increase our prices directly in line with those costs going up if we're going to price ourselves out of the market. What we've seen over the past six months really is there's been steady increases in the Bank of England base rate and expectations are that those rates will continue to increase. We price our buy-to-let product off the swap rate. As Rod mentioned, we received fixed income from our borrowers and we're paying floating.
We use interest rate swaps to match the fixed to fixed and floating to floating. That swap rate that we price off has been incredibly volatile over the past six months. We've seen, it can go up by 20 basis points and then a few days later drop down by 15 basis points and then go back up and go back down. Actually trying to understand what the right price to charge across to our borrowers is a challenge that we talk about very, very regularly within the business. We are expecting to see, especially in the next few months, some margin compression on buy-to-let on those 2- 5-year products where this is especially pronounced. As Rod mentioned earlier, we launched the seven-year fix and the 10-year fix over the last, kind of nine months.
That's actually a much less competitive space with banks especially not wanting to operate in that space because they want to borrow short and lend short for the most part. That's a place where we're far more competitive and there's a lot more opportunity for us. Yeah, the overarching strategy is as we start to suffer higher interest rate costs, then we pass those on to our borrowers.
What about overall cost of lending capital for the group?
Yeah. A lot of the relationships that we have are based on floating rates. As base rates go up, so our costs go up as well. Again, with a large element of it isn't floating, but there are some aspects which are fixed rate as well. Our retail bonds pay a fixed coupon of 5.something%, depending on which retail bond you have. As base rates go up and those costs are passed on to borrowers. Actually in some aspects we can make a bigger margin because those costs are fixed.
Excellent. Very clear. Staying with you, Michael, in terms of controlling risk, we have a question. As you point out, the U.K., the prices in the U.K. housing market have held up well. In the event of a sharp recessionary correction, how quickly do you think you would be able to react to control risk and for instance, change your loan to value requirements?
Yeah. This is something that kind of outside what we've been seeing over the past month, six months is a very real challenge to the business. It's about managing our risk, whether it's credit risk or wider market and macroeconomic risk, and making sure that the products that we're selling is appropriate to the risk at time. I mentioned earlier our impairment provision, our short term lending platform AUM has actually reduced slightly over the past year by 5%. Part of that is because of actions that we took during COVID to restrict the development lending that we were doing. We saw there was a huge amount of risk in the wider economy and development lending, which doesn't sit on our balance sheet. We originate it and sell it to our Luxembourg fund.
There was a risk of potential issues coming down the line on development lending. We took the decision to restrict that at that time. As we're facing in different aspects of risk at the moment, so we also look at different ways we can change the product mix or look at changing LTV, making certain LTVs more preferential or potentially pricing ourselves out of the market if that's what we want to do. There's lots of levers that we can pull, but one of the strengths of the business is we are lending against property, so there's security on each and every single loan that we have. Our average LTV on our lending is around 70%.
We have a huge amount of cover on the loans that we do for any sharp property corrections if that was to happen. Our internal house view is that there will absolutely be a softening in price, maybe even a leveling off, potentially even a small reduction, but with high inflation as well. That means the actual real pricing actually reduced a little bit further. Yeah, we're confident both between the LTV average that we have, but also the impairment provisions which again is forward-looking that gives us plenty of cover.
Great. We've got a question on operational leverage, which was clearly a very impressive feature of these results that you've reported. Two sides to the equation. The outlook for revenue growth seemed to remain strong. How sure are you that the cost side of the equation, human, technological, et cetera, can be contained in the current inflationary conditions?
Yeah. I guess before I answer, give a full answer to that question, I guess in terms of how sure can I be, I mean, we are in a hugely volatile market environment at the moment. While we-
We don't need a percentage figure.
No, exactly. Just to caveat my answer slightly, I mean, we've done a lot of work. It is obviously something we put a lot of time and focus in at the moment as to what we think we're going to be able to achieve over the next year. As Rod mentioned, we're still confident in our overall profitability in terms of forecasts that are out in the market at the moment. Managing our operational expense is really critical, where wage inflation is 10% or wider inflation is 10%+ . As I mentioned earlier, the biggest factor for us in terms of inflation is on wage inflation. Our headcount costs are over 50% of our standard operational expenditure. 10% increase in that is very substantial to the business.
As I mentioned, as part of moving to a hybrid working environment over the past couple of years, we have been hiring more outside of London, where the business has historically been based from a company headquarters perspective and hiring across the U.K. and even into continental Europe, and that's where prices are lower. Even if we see wage inflation increasing in London wages, we're actually offsetting that and in some cases more than that by hiring outside of London. Again, as I mentioned earlier, we're opening up this new office in Glasgow as a way to really keep focus on that hiring outside of London, creating a new second hub, which really allows us to manage costs to the best way that we can. We have hired a huge amount since IPO.
One of the reasons that we came to market for funding was to fast-track our tech roadmap, and we've increased our tech team by 76%, so over the past year since IPO. We have seen some of that coming through, but we're working hard to manage those costs.
Right. Now perhaps one for you, Rod. You sounded very excited about the specialist homeowners segment. Could you give another vote of confidence? Could you explain why you are so confident of winning market share there and explain a little bit about how your underwriting process might differ from historical norms in respect to borrowers who have unpredictable incomes?
Yes. The starting point is that, when we're looking at this sort of specialist homeowner segment, it has many sort of the characteristics that we saw in the buy-to-let space when we were looking at moving into that space. A market that's sort of dominated by relatively small group actually of specialist lenders. These specialist lenders are typically have skilled underwriters, but typically using manual processes to piece together the income of their customers.
It's not too dissimilar when we were looking at the buy-to-let space where you're seeing the emergence of portfolio and professional landlords sort of quite a complex position. We saw that complexity as an opportunity to move into the market, use technology to reduce the complexity. That does sort of two things. It creates the operating leverage for us, so it's more straightforward for us to process the loans and it for the brokers and borrowers, it's a more seamless experience. A lot of what we've achieved in the buy-to-let space, we see as the opportunity and the reasons why we think we'll be successful in moving into the homeowner space. You know, one of those key pieces of technology that we'll use is Open Banking technology.
Instead of PDFs of bank statements being waded through by underwriters and borrowers and brokers, we'll hope to use Open Banking technology to piece that together in an automated way to reduce the friction in the process. That's really what we're going for. It's a big market. It's probably a segment similar to the size of the buy-to-let market that we're currently operating in. It's a big opportunity and we'll find opportunities within that sort of broader opportunity set and build out the product, you know, in a measured way there, making sure that we're providing a differentiated service to brokers in that space.
If I can just add a little bit to Rod's answer as well, just in terms of Open Banking. I'm not sure if everybody who's who will be watching this is familiar as to what that actually means, so just to give a very brief overview. What Open Banking allows us to do is with the borrower's approval to gain access to their account. That kind of scrapes data from the various different bank accounts, but it's not just a case of bringing that data in. Open Banking technology allows us to instantly analyze that data, and importantly for specialist homeowner, which is a regulated product, it allows us to assess the affordability of borrowers as well. We're only giving loans where that borrower can genuinely afford to do it. And it looks for kind of risk profiles and all sorts.
Like, the things that we can do with Open Banking compared to a bank statement is incredible when you kind of get into the nuts and bolts of it. The competitors in the space that we're looking to move into just aren't using this technology in the same way. That's what we think will give us the real differentiation and advantage when we launch this product in the second half of the year.
Right. Thank you. That that's a very neat lead into the next question, Michael. Thank you for that. In terms of the investments that you've made in technology and the knowhow of operating, what opportunities lie in effectively white labeling your technology to a bank or other lenders? And would there be any cost involved for you to adapt that technology before renting it out?
It's been, I suppose, a long-term ambition of the business to use our technology, the technology that we're building in that way. Actually the way that we think about it is that, I suppose the mainstream mortgage market's the big prize in this GBP 1.6 trillion market. The way that we think about tackling particularly that broader mainstream mortgage market is by white labeling our technology or and providing mortgages as a service to lenders in that space.
With that long-term ambition in mind, the technology that we've built is in a way that's flexible using microservices, using modern technology that we believe we will be able to, in a relatively straightforward way, piece together to use it as a third party technology provider to other lenders. In being that sort of longer term ambition for us, we've developed things in a way with that ambition in mind. You know, we do see that as an opportunity, we think now will sort of emerge in the medium term.
Great. Final question. It wouldn't be a webinar without a request for you to get your crystal ball out here. We have an interesting question. What do you or your partners or your clients expect in the way of change should the Renters (Reform) Bill soon become reality? How will that impact the buy-to-let market?
Yeah. Great question. I think the changes continue on the trend that we're already on. We've seen over the last probably nearly 10 years now this further consolidation in the buy-to-let space towards a bigger and bigger professional portfolio landlord. Through time, through a series of regulatory tax changes, we're seeing sort of more and more of the amateur landlords deciding it's too challenging. I think as new regulatory legislation comes in, it just continues the change that we've seen over that period. Fundamentally, we still need private rental accommodation. That is so acute at the moment with rental growth at the level it currently is.
You know, if anyone's been trying to rent property recently, they'll realize how challenging it is, how competitive it is to find rental space. I think that underlying position doesn't disappear. It's the providers of that rental space that's evolving. Clearly, our new portfolio product plays to this further consolidation in the space.
Great. Well, thank you both very much on behalf of the viewers. Thank you to our live audience for questions. Final reminder for people who are perhaps watching this on a recording that the slides referred to with a detailed appendix and lots and lots of other information is available on the LendInvest website. As is, the latest research note from our analyst, Paul Bryant, which I believe sets a fair value for LendInvest shares at GBP 2.70. Well above the current share price, but I'm sure you will both continue the excellent operational momentum to see it move in that direction. Thank you both again for your time.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andy.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, everyone.
Cheers. Bye.