Start chief executive David Ingram said prime lending . . . to conventional borrowers with clean credit histories . . . would be the "next generation" of the company's development.

Start has written 1.4bn of mortgage finance through 450 brokers since opening for business in 2004, according to sales director Paul Murphy, making it the largest player in a market estimated by stockbrokers Davy to grow to 4bn annually by 2010.

Ingram told the Sunday Tribune that "two and a half years is about the right time for credit-repair customers to move onto a mainstream product". He said it was "logical" for Start to look at ways of capturing this business instead of losing it to other established prime lenders, but that the company had "no concrete plans" at the moment for how to accomplish this.

With rising interest rates, challenging funding conditions in the capital markets and a much cooler housing N1 market, new lending in general is slowing down, which means customer retention may become more important than customer acquisition.

Moreover, until early this year, Start and a joint venture shared by GE Money and IFG had the subprime market to themselves, but by mid-year four competitors had joined the scene, chasing sales and growth in a niche that accounts for up to 10% of the whole mortgage market in the UK, but was perhaps only 2.5% of the market in Ireland at the end of 2006.

Since South African investment bank Investec took over Start's majority shareholder Kensington in August, however, the Irish company would appear to have a solid foundation for expansion and diversification, although Ingram said the relationship was too new to draw any firm conclusions.

Start has historically depended on raising money through securitisations of its loan book, but since the US subprime crisis this funding source has become unreliable.

Murphy indicated that Investec's support had allowed Start to stabilise its funding model in the context of the capital markets crisis.

There remains some uncertainty over the longevity of the Investec-Start partnership, thought, as Investec is also a 60% owner of new subprime lender Nua, which entered the market in April with a strong team of GE veterans, but whose articles of association forbid Investec from operating two brands in Ireland.

In April Start debuted a so-called "specialist prime" mortgage. With a 5.35% starting rate, the product was not technically subprime, although it was pitched at the subprime segment.