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When members voted last year for plc-dom, he was not exactly crying in his cups. So was his stance on mutuality genuine? “I did the job I joined to do,” he said.Since last year’s vote to convert was technically an opinion poll of members rather than a legally binding resolution, the board could have stuck to the letter of the society rulebook, and ignored it. But Lindsay Mackinlay, the chairman, reluctantly accepted that there would have been such an uproar that the board had no choice but to accept the defeat, and embrace conversion. “Being indecisive was not in the interests of the society,” he says.Given its size, few in the industry rated its chances of making it to the stock market. Ian Harley, Abbey National chief executive, said at the time that he thought a trade sale was more likely. But the board which had already appointed Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, as its advisers, announced that the preferred route was flotation.But despite the best efforts of Goldmans, and ABN-Amro, Bradford & Bingley’s brokers, no one was willing to pay up for what they still regarded as a not very exciting mortgage business. As it is, some analysts are looking for a valuation of £1.3bn, less than half what some were talking about last year.

That works out at less than £500 worth of shares each for the 2.7 million saving and borrowing members.The speed with which Mr Rodrigues changed tack and threw himself into his new task of preparing the organisation to go public appeared to confirm sceptics’ views about the instability of Mr Rodrigues’ character. As one put it: “In real time he is one of the most impressive thinkers in the world He is very good at thinking on his feet. At City presentations he will have them throwing away their crutches and singing hallelujah The trouble is that there is no consistency. He has changed his mind on every major strategic issue at least once He would make a great politician. But that is not how you run a business.”Critics accuse him of being deal-mad. As well as Charcol, he struck a joint venture deal this year with Alltel, an American mortgage processing company which now manufactures Bradford & Bingley’s mortgages. They say he over-paid for John Charcol, pointing out that Bradford & Bingley paid £100m for a firm which had changed hands several years previously for £30m.They also mock Mr Rodrigues for making the provision of independent financial advice the cornerstone of Bradford & Bingley’s strategy when a few years back, they say, Mr Rodrigues wanted to ditch Bradford & Bingley’s status as an independent financial adviser and tie the society to one insurance provider.

Given his track record, some of his critics say they expect the first thing he will do once flotation is out of the way is sell off the mortgage book and shrink down to a £200m market-capitalisation broker.Listening to his critics, Mr Rodrigues doubts whether people, even the brokers busily running off the buy-notes, really understand what he is trying to do, which is essentially hedge his bets.Regulation, the internet, and the greater general availability of information are wearing down the consumer inertia on which the building societies and banks have traditionally relied.The traditional model where banks and building societies have insisted on selling their own products exclusively through their branches, is outmoded. No one expects to go in to Tesco and be offered only own-label baked beans, so why go into Bradford & Bingley and be offered a standard Bradford & Bingley mortgage whether or not there is better value elsewhere.Mr Rodrigues says: “If you are a small factory but are very efficient you can be a category killer.” Neither describes Bradford & Bingley: “We were a middle-sized, retail, financial-services business. We didn’t have retail scale, we didn’t have manufacturing scale. We weren’t even that mutual.”His answer was to find another way: to restructure the organisation so that it was where it could make money in the mortgage market – which, in small specialist niches, it did – and where it could not, it at least took a commission on selling a product which was more suited to the customer’s needs.Mr Rodrigues admits that there is an element of making a virtue out of a necessity “As a plc you need to have a point of difference. You have to play with the cards you are dealt.” But he believes that other mortgage banks or building societies whose only strategy is to hope that they are the great survivors of the current mortgage price war are simply fooling themselves.Before it voted to go public, Bradford & Bingley, like other building societies, had sought to buy customer loyalty with so-called mutual-benefits packages.

As a short-term strategy, giving away profits to members in the form of better interest rates for both savers and borrowers has worked for the likes of Nationwide. But giving away your reserves for short-term market share is slow-motion suicide whether you are a mutual or a plc.Mr Rodrigues believes that if Bradford & Bingley reaches his goal of making 50 per cent of its turnover from sales commissions on other people’s products in five years, he will have a structure under which Bradford & Bingley will be a winner either way. “If the market becomes ever more competitive and people give their shirts away, we are in a wonderful position as a cost-effective retailer We still take our cut on every mortgage sold. At the same time we still believe there are parts of the mortgage market where you can make money.”Mr Rodrigues believes the critics have not grasped how important it is for the success of his strategy that he has now out-sourced mortgage provision to the joint venture with Alltel. Without that detachment from the manufacturing side of the mortgage business, the change of focus from volume to profits would have been still-born.”Because we no longer own our factory, I don’t have to keep on selling mortgages to keep the factory full,” he says. “If you stop being fixated with manufacturing your own product, you can stop wasting your time on customers who don’t make you any money. This is a very joined-up strategy.”Those who think he is going the right way are still concerned that even if he succeeds in growing Charcol as fast as he plans, the fact remains that 85 per cent of its current assets are mainstream mortgages where the competition is fiercest.

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