Ross Commercial Finance is celebrating a hat-trick of awards success having retained its title as Scotland’s best broker and coming highly commended as the best commercial mortgage broker in the UK for a second year.
Its CEO Emma Ross continues to be recognised for helping to shape the future for women in business, winning the coveted Women’s Advocate Award at the prestigious NACFB Commercial Broker Awards 2026 which celebrates broking excellence.
This comes as the East Kilbride mum-of-two was added to the top 100 female entrepreneurs to watch in Scotland for a second consecutive year.
From starting out answering phones at HSBC, sales-driven Emma moved her way up through commercial banking to landing a position at a brokerage down south which inspired her to take the leap and start her own business.
Headquartered at Orbital House in East Kilbride, providing commercial mortgages, development finance, bridging loans, and acquisition funding, in just three years Ross Commercial Finance is chalking up the awards as one of the best in the business.
The broker also launched award-winning podcast Business, Balls and Banter last year - which recently got ‘highly commended’ at the Scottish Podcast Awards - and established girls and ladies only charity football club She Can FC 18 months ago.
Now Emma is championing the future leaders in finance as far as she can to get as many women to the top tables and become decision makers. Emma has recently been making business plans with 25 of She Can FC’s under-14 players to raise £500 each towards a life-changing trip to Boston in the United States in April 2027.
In January she will be hosting a ‘Dragon’s Den’ where some of the girls will pitch their ideas to a panel of “highly influential powerhouse women” for the opportunity of investment by Ross Commercial Finance to help their businesses flourish.
Commenting on her passion project, Emma told Scottish News: “My biggest passion is She Can FC. Glasgow and Boston are becoming a sister city in April following the World Cup so we’re taking 25 girls over for the sister city signing during Tartan Week.
“We didn’t just want to do fundraising, we wanted the girls to actually earn their own way there so they feel like they’ve contributed to being there. I sat down with the girls and did mini business plans with them all. We looked at cash flow forecasting, set them up bank accounts, email addresses and one of the girls made the £500 target in six days which is amazing.
“We do monthly check-ins with them and in January we’re doing a Dragon’s Den with women-led businesses. There will be a panel of five and I’m actually going to invest in the best business. We’re also going to have the She Can FC Business Awards on the lead up to it.
“In Boston they’re going to be playing lots of other teams but there’s one team called She Belongs, made up of refugees, who are going to bring their team over here as well. We’ve also linked up with Harvard University the girls will get the chance to do a business course there and get a certificate. It’s not just about football, the whole reason behind it is to give the girls lots of different experiences. We’re really lucky that we can give them work experience as well as marketing and female empowerment courses to give them as much opportunities as we can. Some of these girls come from really difficult backgrounds and would never have been out of the UK never mind to America, some haven’t even heard of Boston - its going to be phenomenal.”
Both Emma’s daughters Hali, 13, and nine-year-old Jessa play for She Can FC and their hardworking mum is intent on teaching them the value of money and that anything is possible when it comes to your career - even for a woman in business.
“Only in the last six months my eldest daughter’s attitude has changed”, explained Emma. “Before she would say ‘you work too much’ as I always have my laptop on, but now she says she really appreciates me now I’ve started making her do work experience for her pocket money. She’s starting to appreciate that you need to work for your money and earn your own way.”
Recently Emma got mistaken for a personal assistant and the individual was promptly corrected by a colleague that she was in fact the CEO. Emma says she believes its important to see representation to change attitudes towards women in power.
“I think because I’m always really casually dressed, with my tattoos out, people just automatically assume it’s my husband Marty’s company and I’m just the wife on the payroll”, said Emma. “I think I’ve just become numb to comments like that now I’m so used to it.
“I’ve always believed in being able to see representation. A lot of times within football clubs you’ve got women in much lower jobs and not in natural decision making positions.
“When you’ve got girls who are wanting to grow up and see what’s possible you still have this glass ceiling. In my old company, they could tick the box that 50 per cent were females, but they were only at admin level, the higher paid jobs in senior management were all men. It’s just this thing that I’ve always had, that I want to have my girls seeing that there’s no glass ceilings and they can be at the same level and on the same kind of salary as men. The main thing is that it’s possible.”
Business, Balls and Banter launched a year ago and has already been highly commended in the Scottish Podcast Awards. They came runner-up to winners Sir Tom Hunter and Lord Willie Haughey’s Go Radio Business Show.
“In my head we won but we were never beating them, let’s be honest”, she added. “Podcasting can be a bit of a challenge. At the start you’re pulling in people you’re friends with, but its a lot harder to get people on a year down the line and you have an hour to fill.
“We’re filming again this week for the podcast with three good guests - Lynne Kennedy from Business Woman Scotland, Mark Brown who is an architect from East Kilbride and the amazing Vinny McKee who got the golden buzzer on Britain’s Got Talent for his emotional rendition of 500 Miles, and we have another three really good guests next month.
“Everyone who has been on has got really good feedback and got good recognition off it. Ideally we want any business owners with a story and football-related as well. The ones which had the best views are the ex-footballers - but they don’t always come with the best audience. Our business podcasts get a lot more positive comments.
“I do love our podcast because there’s the three of us and we can bounce off each other in a quiet moment. We seem to be getting more and more followers and subscribers.”
Commenting on her recent awards success, Emma says achieving a hat-trick at the most prestigious awards in the UK for finance is testament to the impact Ross Commercial Finance is having across the border.
She added: “October 28 will be our third birthday and we’ve just went from strength to strength. The company has won many awards, but the biggest one in our industry is the NACFB Awards because that’s our governing body and the judges are seeing what we’re doing every day, so it means more to us.
“This really was a big one for me because it’s voted for by the lenders we use and is a lot harder to win. The judging panel is made up of mostly English lenders and a lot of the companies won’t have heard of us. So the fact we came highly commended in that after winning it last year is amazing for us to win. It shows the impact we’re having.”