The Companies House Playbook for UK Specialist Lender Origination

UK specialist lender origination is dominated by broker channels. Brokers know their clients, package the deals, and present qualified borrowers to a panel of lenders. For most lenders, this remains the right primary channel. But it is not the only channel, and it leaves a meaningful slice of the addressable market unaddressed.

The slice that broker channels miss: borrowers who have exhausted their broker relationships, borrowers who have never used a broker, borrowers whose situation is too time-sensitive to wait for a broker to package, and borrowers whose lender stack is multi-relationship rather than single-broker. Direct origination against the Companies House and Gazette data sits underneath those gaps.

What the data actually contains

Three public registers together form the data foundation:

• Companies House. Every UK-registered company, every director, every registered office, every accounts filing, every charge filing.
• HM Land Registry. Every freehold and leasehold title in England & Wales, every owner, every priority notice.
• The London Gazette + Edinburgh Gazette + Belfast Gazette. Every formal corporate insolvency notice, every dissolution, every appointment of administrator or liquidator.

Individually, each register is useful but fragmented. The commercial value comes from cross-referencing the three so that a single record (a UK property company) carries its directors, its properties, its lender stack, its charge ages, and its distress signals in one row.

The five-step lender prospecting motion

An originator running direct prospecting against this data typically follows the same five-step motion:

1. Define product fit. Bridge term length, LTV band, asset type, geography, minimum and maximum loan size.
2. Convert product fit to signal filters. Each product attribute maps to a Companies House filter (e.g. "12-month refurbishment bridge for a single SPV with one freehold title" = SPV with single title + active first-charge BTL aged 11 to 14 months).
3. Pull the matched prospect list. Typically 200 to 2,000 companies per quarter depending on product breadth and geography.
4. Sequence outreach. Director-level mail, email, or call grounded in the observable charge/Gazette/title fact. ("We've noticed your facility with X is now Y months over its expected term...")
5. Convert through pipeline. Typical conversion from outreach to indicative quote is 4 to 12%; from indicative quote to facility 15 to 30%. Net 0.6 to 3.6% of outreach to facility.

Where direct prospecting beats broker channels

Three specific cases:

• Refinance against overdue facilities. Borrowers with bridge debt 18+ months overdue have typically exhausted their broker relationships. Direct outreach with a take-out quote competes against no one.
• Portfolio refinance. Multi-lender portfolio borrowers shop refinance themselves; they value lender directly approaching them with a portfolio-level quote.
• Distress workout. Borrowers in early-stage distress (CVA, Notices to Creditors) are typically beyond the broker channel because their packaging is not yet a clean deal.

Where direct prospecting does not replace broker channels

For clean originations on standard products with no time pressure, brokers remain the more efficient channel because they handle qualification, packaging, and borrower management at lower marginal cost to the lender. Direct prospecting is additive to broker flow, not substitutive.

What an originator should not do

• Cold-call borrowers with no observable signal in the public data. The conversion rate is poor and the brand damage is real.
• Approach borrowers in mid-broker process. Most major brokers register their packaging activity; respect the active broker relationship.
• Treat distress signals as automatic origination opportunities. Many distressed borrowers cannot be refinanced; the right product may be workout finance, NPL acquisition, or no product at all.

How GalimAI operationalises the playbook

The portal sits on top of the three public registers. Lenders configure their product-fit filter stack, the portal returns the matched prospect list with director-level contact data, and the lender runs outreach through their own CRM. We do not write loans; we surface the prospect universe and the contact path.

For lenders running an in-house origination function alongside broker flow, the direct-prospect motion typically adds 15 to 30% to overall origination volume.

England & Wales coverage on the property linkage; UK-wide on the company and Gazette layers.