Building its customer relationships in a difficult lending environment
Priding itself on its relationship with its large customer base of property investors, Empower Wealth has found one of the biggest challenges of the year to be navigating the current lending environment.
Guiding their customers through each stage of the journey to owning their own investment property has been made that much harder with the longer turnaround times and extra work.
“Getting appropriate funding for our clients’ planned journey meant we were challenged with excessive lending credit policy changes, long delays on the back of extra scrutiny and some unnecessary reworking in our opinion,” says Ben Kingsley, founder and managing director of Empower Wealth.
“Ultimately, a less productive and efficient lending environment leads to greater client expectation management and hand holding, resulting in increased workloads for no client upside.”
Despite the challenges of the past year and a half, the brokerage wrote some good figures and celebrates its success in “finding novel and advantageous ways” to help its customers.
The group has built a cloud-based Wealth Portal and Money SMARTS money management system for its customers to follow to help them better manage their money and trap more surplus.
Looking ahead to the future, Empower Wealth plans to continue its investment in innovation with the aim of deepening their connection with their customers.
Total loan book: $374,489,436
Total settlements 1 March 2018 – 28 February 2019: $263,508,986
Number of loan writers: 6
Avg. annual volume per broker: $43,918,164.33
Conversion rate: 70.36%
