About Islay Robinson.

Founder and CEO of Enness Global. 18+ years arranging large and complex mortgages. £10bn+ placed across 1,000+ lenders. Based in Mayfair; clients in 80+ countries.

Islay Robinson is the founder and CEO of Enness Global, a Mayfair-based high-value mortgage broker, which he launched in August 2007. He has personally led more than £10 billion of lending across 1,000+ banks and private lenders, advising clients of 80+ nationalities on UK and international mortgages from £1m to £250m+. He sits on the Tatler Financial Advisory Board, with Enness chaired by Nigel Le Quesne, founder of FTSE 250-listed JTC Group.

The week Northern Rock failed

I started Enness in August 2007. Two weeks later, people were queuing around the block to get their money out of Northern Rock. It was not, on paper, the correct moment to launch a mortgage broker.

I did it anyway because I had a very specific view of what was missing from the market. The large banks were structured to process applications that fit their boxes. International earners, entrepreneurs, people with complex balance sheets, clients who wanted to borrow £5m against a Chelsea house held in an offshore trust - these weren't edge cases to us, they were the entire business. And nobody was building a firm for them that treated complexity as the point rather than as a problem to argue about.

Nineteen years later, I'm still doing exactly that. What's changed is the scale of the client base, the reach of the lender panel, and the fact that I'm no longer opening my own post.

I run a broking desk personally, and I run the firm. Some numbers I'll own:

-£10bn+ of lending arranged in my career to date

-1,000+ bank and private-lender relationships actively maintained by the firm

-80+ nationalities of clients served 22+ advisors at Enness reporting into me and Toby Johncox, our Group Managing Director

-18+ years running the same firm, under the same brand, through two credit cycles, a pandemic and three UK governments

The cases I take on personally tend to share a pattern. Large. International. Non-standard. Specifically:

-UK mortgages from £1m to £100m+ - prime central London, country estates, portfolios

-Foreign national purchases - clients based in the US, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe buying UK property

-European finance - France, Monaco, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, with particular depth in Alpine chalets and Côte d'Azur villas

-Bridging - seven-figure and eight-figure short-term facilities, including a specialist bridging operation that the firm has supported across 17 European countries

-SPV and trust structures - where the lender actually understands the ownership diagram before asking for documentation

-Unusual income - private equity carry, sovereign wealth-linked, dividend-heavy entrepreneurs, pre-IPO equity

I've held the same views for a long time. If you're going to hire me, they're worth knowing up front.

1. The lender you bank with is rarely the lender you should borrow from.

Your relationship manager is not your mortgage underwriter. Treating the two as interchangeable is the single most common reason large mortgages price badly or don't close at all.

2. Execution matters more than headline rate.

A loan that closes at 5.2% is always cheaper than a loan that doesn't close at 5.0%. Time, optionality and certainty are worth real money, and on large cases they dominate the economics.

3. Specialisation beats access.

Being on a lender's panel doesn't mean much. Knowing what that lender has said yes to in the last ninety days - and what they've quietly said no to, means everything.

4. Preparation is what defines whether a loan completes.

The quality of the application file I put in front of an underwriter on day one sets the terms for the next ninety days. I've lost count of the number of clients who arrived with deals that had been declined elsewhere, repackaged them correctly, and completed them within a few weeks.

Alongside Enness, I co-founded a specialist European bridging lender in 2021, backed by institutional funding supported by Elliott Management. The business operates across 17+ European countries, with an average loan size of around £5 million and more than £600 million of committed credit lines.

I do not name it on this site because it is funder-facing rather than consumer-facing, but the experience has given me direct operational insight into European short-term lending markets that few brokers have exposure to.