Hiring Credit and Underwriting Professionals in UK Specialist Lending: 2026 Market Update
Lending markets move in cycles. The professionals who understand credit do not appear and disappear at the same pace.
That mismatch is creating a hiring challenge for many UK specialist lenders, asset finance businesses, and challenger banks in 2026. After two years of consolidation, reduced origination volumes, and cautious headcount management, a number of firms are finding that the capability they need is not as available as they expected.
The recovery has not been uniform. Some segments, including asset finance, bridging, and certain areas of commercial property lending, have seen activity return faster than others. Invoice finance and trade finance businesses have been more cautious. Challenger banks are at various stages of rebuilding origination teams that were scaled back during the rate cycle. What most of these firms share is a recognition that they need experienced credit professionals and a growing awareness of how difficult those hires are proving to make.
Good credit people are rarely unemployed. That has always been true. What has changed is the shape of what firms are looking for.
For much of the past decade, many lending businesses invested heavily in automated decisioning. Credit models became more sophisticated. Data inputs multiplied. The assumption in some quarters was that experienced underwriters would become less important over time.
The past two years have tested that assumption. Portfolios with heavy model dependency encountered situations the models had not been trained to navigate. Credit committees found they were approving or declining proposals without anyone in the room who had actually worked through a difficult credit cycle. The institutional memory that comes from having underwritten through a period of real stress turned out to be harder to replace than expected.
As a result, the hiring brief at many firms has shifted. Technical competence in credit analysis and underwriting remains essential. Firms are also looking, with greater intent than before, for professionals who bring genuine commercial judgement, who understand when a deal that looks weak on paper has merit and when a deal that looks clean carries risks the model is not capturing.
Hiring within Asset Finance or Specialist Lending?
Fram Search supports lenders, asset finance providers, challenger banks and debt advisory firms with recruitment across origination, sales, underwriting, credit, risk and leadership appointments.
Whether you are building a team, replacing a key hire or exploring the current talent market, contact us on 01525 864 372 or email [email protected].
That combination is genuinely difficult to hire for, partly because it takes years to develop and partly because the people who have it tend to be well looked after by their current employers.
The market also varies significantly by specialism. Asset finance underwriters with experience across hard assets, soft assets, and vendor programmes sit in a different talent pool from credit risk managers at challenger banks building retail or SME lending books. Bridging and development finance requires a different profile again. Firms that approach these searches as if credit is a single homogeneous discipline tend to run longer processes and make more compromises than those that are precise about what they actually need.
Candidate behaviour has also changed. Experienced credit professionals are receiving approaches consistently, but they are taking longer to make decisions than they did in the hiring market of 2021 and 2022. The questions they ask have shifted. Funding stability, ownership structure, and the quality of the credit committee and risk framework matter more than they did. A higher base salary is rarely sufficient on its own. Candidates want to understand whether the business has a coherent lending strategy and whether the people making decisions understand credit.
Firms that articulate this clearly tend to run shorter, more successful searches. Those that lead with compensation and follow up with a vague description of growth plans tend to find that the strongest candidates lose interest quickly.
The timing question is also worth considering directly. Several firms that deferred hiring decisions through 2024 and into early 2025, waiting for clearer signals on rates and volumes, are now finding themselves competing for the same small group of available candidates at the same moment. The firms that moved earlier, when the market felt less certain, secured stronger hires at more straightforward terms.
At Fram Search, we work with specialist lenders, asset finance businesses, challenger banks, and alternative credit providers on credit, risk, and underwriting appointments across the UK. We cover credit analysts, underwriters, portfolio managers, credit risk managers, heads of credit, and chief credit officers.
If you are planning to build or rebuild a credit function in 2026, we are glad to have an early conversation about what the market looks like before a formal search begins.
About Fram Search
Established in 2010, Fram Search is a specialist financial services recruitment consultancy. We support asset finance providers, specialist lenders, challenger banks, debt advisory firms and wider debt & capital solutions businesses across the UK and internationally.
Our Asset Finance & Specialist Lending practice recruits across sales, origination, underwriting, credit, risk, collections, finance, operations and executive leadership functions. We work across asset finance, leasing, bridging finance, development finance, invoice finance and specialist lending, helping clients secure high-performing talent in revenue-generating and credit-critical roles. We provide both contingent recruitment and executive search services, combining deep market knowledge with extensive candidate networks.
Please contact us on 01525 864 372 / [email protected] to learn more.
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