We are a UK specialist bank. Our lending products include mortgages for landlords and loans for business customers.

Find out how we use our expertise to help customers in a range of specialist markets.

Our strategy is to build a specialist bank for our customers, which delivers sustainable growth and shareholder returns through a low risk and robust model.

Overview

2020 Annual Report and Accounts

Find out more about our business and how it has developed and performed during an unprecedented year.

Find out more

Sustainability

Sustainability is central to our long-term success and it influences every aspect of our business

Overview

Covid-19 response

Find out how we’ve been helping customers, keeping safe and supporting our communities.

News

Keep up-to-date with the latest new releases and insights from across our business.

Overview

Buy-to-let investment in the South West

From digital industries to tourism and agriculture, what’s driving rental demand in the South West?

Careers

We understand how important our employees are to the business and, in recognition of this, we provide a variety of excellent reasons to work for us.

Overview

Meet Alex Harris

"The placement year has given me experience to complement my academic studies and the opportunity to test my skills in the real world."

Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic presents wide-ranging challenges for individuals and organisations across the globe.

During this difficult time, our priorities are to protect our people, support our customers and suppliers, to safeguard our capital base and preserve the long-term value of the business.

Operational response

Our operational response to Covid-19 was swift. By deploying our well-developed contingency plans, we have been able to maintain service to customers, reflecting our highly agile and flexible infrastructure, technology and people.

Customer support

The skills and experience of our specialist customer-facing teams put us in a strong position to understand the impact of Covid-19 on customers and to support them with a range of payment relief options and recovery assistance.

Payment relief

Customers representing 21% of loan balances were given a payment deferral of some sort. Of those, almost 95% had recovered sufficiently by 31 October 2020 and no longer need support.

Mortgage customers

Mortgage payment holidays and other forms of relief have been an essential lifeline for landlords, helping them to offer security and support to their tenants.

Business customers

To help business customers get back on their feet, we gained accreditation to offer Government-backed Coronavirus Business Interruption Loans and Bounce Back Loans.

Employee wellbeing

Protecting the health and wellbeing of our people throughout the pandemic has been critical and continues to be a guiding factor.

Home working

By 31 March 2020, over 90% of our people were working from home, supported by IT upgrades and expanded use of technology across the business. We didn’t put any employees on furlough, choosing instead to adopt a flexible approach to working patterns and to focus on policies which would raise morale and wellbeing.

Staying safe

Throughout lockdown, around 10% of our employees continued to travel to work to deliver essential services to our customers which could not be carried out from home. To keep them safe, we implemented strict social distancing, together with additional measures to boost hygiene.

Enhanced management

To bolster employee support throughout the pandemic, we asked managers to keep in more regular contact with their teams, providing them with additional training and better technology to support video contact and collaborative working.

Wellbeing support

Regular wellbeing surveys enable employees to tell us how they’re coping and to highlight where extra support is needed. Our intranet site features a host of wellbeing news, including support for parents and signposting to useful resources and to our Wellbeing Team.

Community assistance

The virus, the lockdown and the continuing restrictions have put added pressure on the NHS and many of the essential services upon which our communities rely. We have been keen to play our part, providing and supporting charities where we can.

£100,000 charity donation

In June 2020, Paragon made a £100,000 donation across four different organisations to help them reach more people with their essential services during the pandemic. These included the NHS, Solihull Change into Action, Age UK and Macmillan Cancer Support.

Move for Macmillan

Over 65 employees from 13 different departments took part in our Move for Macmillan challenge, using their exercise time during lockdown to clock up over 10,000km and raise more than £18,000 in sponsorship.

We will continue to play our part, working together with our customer and suppliers, our people and our communities, to make sure that we get through these challenging times together.