The Intermediary – January 2026 - Flipbook - Page 34
The Interview.
OSB Group
at OSB Group, to discuss why the business
chose this moment to bring Rely to market, how
the platform fits into OSB’s long-term brand
architecture, and what he expects from the
wider market in 2026.
Why Rely?
Jessica O’Connor speaks with
Adrian Moloney, group lending
distribution director at OSB Group,
about the launch of Rely, and how
the market is shaping the group’s
strategy for 2026
n a buy-to-let (BTL) market that has
spent the last few years oscillating
between resilience and reinvention,
lenders have been forced to decide what
they want to be. For some, the response
has been to retreat into narrower
appetites and smaller niches. For others,
it has been to place bigger bets, by
investing in technology and propositions, and
designing journeys that reflect a customer
base that is not just borrowing differently but
behaving differently.
OSB Group’s launch of Rely – its new
investor-focused brand – sits firmly in the
second camp. It is not simply a new name. It
is a consolidation of buy-to-let identity and
a signal that OSB wants to compete not only
on product breadth, but on decisioning speed,
broker usability, and the ability to adjust quickly
as market conditions change. To examine this
innovation, The Intermediary sat down with
Adrian Moloney, group intermediary director
I
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The Intermediary | January 2026
When asked what prompted OSB to launch
Rely at this exact moment, Moloney is clear: the
work behind the launch has been long in the
making.
He says: “This wasn’t an overnight project.
This has been going on for a couple of years,
as we looked at how we could modernise
and transform our business as a whole, in
terms of both our technology and what we
fundamentally do.”
Like much of the specialist lending market,
OSB Group has grown through mergers
and acquisitions, creating both reach and
complexity. Its multiple brands – Precise,
InterBay and historically Kent Reliance for
Intermediaries – exist to serve different
borrower segments across the full scope of
the lending market. However, balancing these
different brand identities can also create
confusion, as Moloney describes a buy-to-let
set-up that, over time, had become multithreaded.
“As a result of acquisitions over the years we
ended up with three brands that did buy-tolet in InterBay, Precise and Kent Reliance for
Intermediaries,” he says.
Rather than keeping buy-to-let split
across multiple propositions, OSB took the
opportunity to create a single investor brand
with a more coherent product and platform
narrative.
Moloney adds: “We looked at the journey and
the experience and the offering, and realised
by combining all three, whilst doing different
things, we were able to bring the best of those
lenders into one brand.”
In Moloney’s framing, Rely acts as both a
consolidation and an upgrade. He notes that
a new platform should not merely replicate
an old one with new branding but combine
institutional knowledge with renewed design
thinking. In fact, he does not position Rely as
a finished product. Indeed, OSB intends it to
evolve its proposition gradually over time.
