Business Profile: West Bromwich Building Society Chief Executive Robert Sharpe
Who’d want to run a building society these days?
Robert Sharpe, for one. He came out of lucrative retirement after a successful, if controversial, spell of running the Portman (now subsumed into the gargantuan Nationwide) to take over the seemingly doomed West Brom.
Mutuals were once a dusty, stolid, unexciting corner of the financial services world. They existed to provide a secure home for savings and lend against rock-solid residential properties.
Then came the City’s “Big Bang” of 1987. It exploded all the traditional financial models and sent building societies spinning off into exciting new galaxies in which they converted themselves into banks, amalgamated into ever-bigger institutions and invented exciting new ways of losing money.
Twenty years later, with the collapse of sub-prime lending and the subsequent freezing of the wholesale money markets, some hitherto solid institutions collapsed.
The biggest casualty in the West Midlands was the West Bromwich Building Society and the fact that it’s still in existence and still independent is in large measure due to Robert Sharpe since he was parachuted into the critically ill organisation 13 months ago.
His story begins in south London where he was born in 1948.
There is, as he says, “nothing amazing” about his background. He left school after O-levels and went to work at a firm of solicitors with no particular career in mind.
“I went go grammar school but spent most of my time kicking or throwing a ball. I went for the first job that came along and I was very lucky that I chose a firm of solicitors.”
Robert worked for seven years with various London law firms and qualified as a legal executive.
In 1974 he found himself working in the legal department of a subsidiary of the Bank of America, then the largest bank in the world. He ended up running the BoA’s finance company in Reading, having been sent in to close it down.
“While I was there I saw an opportunity for them to enter the UK mortgage market,” Robert says.
He was part of a strategy team looking at BoA’s options in a UK financial services market that was just beginning to change.
“It was a very interesting team,” he says with some degree of understatement.
Apart from himself it comprised Archie Norman, former Asda boss and now chairman of ITV, and Keith Edleman who became chief executive of Arsenal.
The returns on home lending were high and the bank had surplus sterling funds to put to good use.
“I wrote a business plan, which they accepted, and turned the finance company into a mortgage company.
“We launched our first mortgages in 1980, which was the time the clearing banks got into the market – Williams & Glyn’s was the first. It was the start of the change from building societies being the only people supplying mortgages into a more competitive market.”
Bank of America targeted a niche market, lending on property valued at more than £37,500, the level at which building societies at the time were compelled to ration loans. “How the world’s changed,” Robert says.
By the time the business was taken over by Bank of Ireland in 1987 it had a loans book of about £1 billion, largely centred on the London and South East markets. With Bank of America retreating to its California base, Robert had to choose between going to the US or staying in the UK as chief executive of what became Bank of Ireland mortgages.
He chose Bank of Ireland.
“I had made the monthly commute to San Francisco, where Bank of America’s head office was for meetings, and anyone who says transatlantic travel is fun they want to do that on a monthly basis. Many times I had to go to San Francisco for a two-hour meeting and catch the next flight back.”
In 1994 he moved to the Bournemouth-based Portman Building Society, becoming chief executive in 1999.
Between then and the merger with Nationwide in 2007 Robert presided over rapid merger-driven expansion – the Portman rocketed from 13th in the building society league to third. Along the way it acquired the Staffordshire BS.
He says of that time: “I was described as various things in the building society movement but I saw mergers as being an extremely efficient way of growing your business.
“My ambition for the Portman was for it be one of the most successful, if not the most successful, building society and to me scale was
