The specialist lender opened for business to brokers on Monday at an event at The Exchange in Glasgow, the first of three Scottish sessions this week, with Edinburgh and Aberdeen to follow.

Rob Barnard, intermediary relationship director at Pepper Money, told brokers that the lender does not expect customers to stay with it, and described the process as rehabilitation, with borrowers given help and a mortgage to rebuild their finances over a two or five year term before returning to the high street.

Mr Barnard described a customer who told him that Pepper Money had saved his life after he was turned away by a bank and a broker and had to rent for around 18 months.

He said the customer rang several months ago to say he was leaving Pepper: “Rob rang me up six, seven months ago, saying: ‘I’ve got some bad news for you Rob. I’m leaving Pepper.’ I told him that’s not bad news, that’s brilliant news and that’s the end to end cycle. It’s a perfect story there of how we help somebody end to end, but we’re helping them get back to the high street.”

Paul Adams, sales director at Pepper Money, said about 20% of customers reaching the end of a fixed rate stay with the lender, and that the rest move on. He said Pepper lends to people whose circumstances do not fit automated high street models, including the self-employed, those with complex income and those with historic adverse credit.

Mr Barnard said Pepper does not use credit scores to decide whether to lend or to set the price. He said most of the business the lender writes has no adverse credit and simply fails because of a blip.

He said every member of staff at Pepper Money has completed at least two training courses on “how to deal with Scottish businesses”, adding: “we know the launching in Scotland isn’t as simple as throwing over a half of postcode into our systems… there’s lots ow work that we did behind the scene.”

He also said: “Somebody might not be ready for a mortgage but you can get them ready, I think there’s no harm in seeing the customer as early as you can in the journey, if they want to be first-time buyer in a year’s time, give them a clue as to what they need to do - to make sure they don’t levers like Pepper. Tell them to keep the bank account open and go over, make sure they are paying the payments and that might do as a job and then they’ll never need a specialist like Pepper.”

Mr Barnard pointed to a Martin Lewis programme on credit scores from last year, saying Lewis did a “really good job. The only thing that frustrated me about it was, he didn’t go far enough. It was all about this is your credit score. This is what you get, a credit score pass. He didn’t give consumers the reassurance to save, even just finish it with, but if you do fail your credit score go and see a broker, that’s what frustrated me. That’s the confidence gap.”

He said credit difficulties are often caused by a life event, citing divorce, bereavement and redundancy, which can leave a blip that makes it difficult to get loans and mortgages, explaining customers had often paid everything before and since the event.

He acknowledged the lender is a little more expensive than the high street, but said the premium applies only for a limited period, as the group aims to “turn blips into dips”.