Who is Phil Walker? Tell us a bit more about your path.

I was born in the Midlands of England and moved to Paris as a teenager. On returning to the UK to complete my education I started on a management programme for a large national bank, but soon switched to an American finance house, where my career took off and became more focused on the collections and recovery side of the business. I’ve spent much of my career working with American finance businesses which teaches you how to be a ‘can do’ person. For the last 20 years I’ve been consulting and guiding  with a focus on the collection side of the industry. I studied for an MBA and a decade ago was proudly accepted as a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.

Over the last 4-5 years I’ve been working with investors across the European markets before joining Hipoges in April 2018.

How are you adapting to Spain?

It’s a great place to work with fantastic people. As a ‘Brit.’ I cannot help but enjoy the sun, food and the vino. Getting to grips with the language is fun and I have over 300 tutors in Hipoges, although it feels more like 300 English students…

What are your main day-to-day responsibilities?

Day to day is about managing and supporting the skilled teams in Operations with the €15b of assets we have under management in Spain, although my wider focus is helping the company grow and adapt to become a big business.

In your opinion, what are the most important attributes you need to have in your position?

I’m a people person and try to help each and everyone to get the best from themselves, grow, learn and develop. It’s amazing when you remove obstacles and let the highly talented people around you to flourish just how much they can achieve. I see that as my job. I’ve also been very lucky to work in so many parts of the world from Europe to USA, Central America and Australia in over a hundred companies and really enjoy sharing the knowledge and insights to benefit others.

What would you highlight about HipoGes?

Without doubt it’s the most dynamic and focused team I have ever worked with.  We’ve grown and developed so fast in so many directions even since I joined and I’m immensely proud of how the teams achieve outstanding results.

What are the challenges that you believe HipoGes will face in the future?

I think it’s going to be a combination of changes in the market as the type of portfolios changes from the large corporate and developer to the more consumer and retail based portfolios, combined with the need for Hipoges to develop itself ahead of the competition to remain competitive. We’re also going to see big change as we develop our model to be agile, lean and dynamic and at the same time learn how to work across several offices and with many more external partners.

What are the future perspectives of the NPL market?

I believe we’re in for a very busy 2019 and going forward as the banks divest of very large NPL and REO portfolios and more investors move into the sector. We already see many multi-billion Euro portfolios on the market this year and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.

It’s a great problem for us have!!