LMG brokers can see and organise all loan deals in one place
LMG brokers can now reap the benefits of a game-changing new technology tool – Deal Board – that is set to transform the way they organise their loans deals, while driving efficiency and boosting productivity.
Unveiled yesterday, the final day of the Loan Market Scale Up conference held in Adelaide on August 5 and 6, Deal Board is the latest addition to MyCRM, LMG’s proprietary business systems platform.
Deal Board provides an all-encompassing, easy to read, single platform digital view of a brokerage’s activities, the status of loan deals and business pipeline that can be customised by the business owner to suit their needs.
It is also housed within MyCRM, removing the need for double entry of data across multiple project platforms and the costs associated with additional external programs.
LMG group executive customer experience Jason Furnell (pictured above) explained how Deal Board worked during his Scale Up presentation titled “Technology Radar: Where we are today, what’s on the horizon”
Speaking to MPA ahead of his Scale Up talk, Furnell said the focus was on the launch of the Deal Board, a range of process and productivity tools (including My Activities and improved Workflows) that allowed businesses to get a very simple, visual overview of all the deals going on in their business and manage them using a card metaphor.
“Deal Board and the surrounding tools are the most anticipated productivity enhancement within MyCRM we’ve ever delivered. And it has all been driven by our businesses,” Furnell said.
“You just click and drag to another column and then out of that it can apply automation, workflows, tasks,” Furnell said. ‘It’s a way of driving consistency into your business from that central dashboard.”
“You can jump into deals, you can add notes, complete tasks, apply task workflows, see the details – all from one place.
“In many ways, the old method of having a whiteboard, there’s some nice things about that. You get a better view of everything that’s going on, it just takes a bit of work to keep it up to date. This is the digital version of a whiteboard.”
Asked how Deal Board differed from other aggregators systems, Furnell said what made it unique was the complete integration with LMG’s MyCRM.
“What we’re really excited about is that you don’t need to manage two platforms to use that functionality. It’s all in one place and integrated.”
Furnell explained that when a broker created a client and deal in the system it would appear as a card in Deal Board.
It also automatically moves a card from one status to another as updates occur and pull throughs data from the application such as the lender and value.
At a glance, business owners can understand what is coming through the pipeline and what has hit a bottleneck, and whether a broker or lender needs to become involved.
“You can for example, see all the deals that have been dormant for a while, or order it by the urgency of task. It’s quite a powerful way of getting on top of what you need to do,” Furnell said.
Broker feedback played a key role in Deal Board
Furnell said LMG had always wanted to invest in ensuring brokers could enshrine their business process in the platform.
He said it had been an evolution – from having a pipeline, list-based view of all the deals as well as automation, tasks and notes for some time now. “But it’s all come together now in this one productivity, central control within the CRM.”
Deal Board had been in research and development for a few years and in pilot phase for about four months. It has been developed in direct response to business feedback.
“Business owners, brokers and support staff have all wanted a more visual and intuitive layout that connected all their deal details and activities into a single view and made it easy to prioritise and collaborate.”
More than 100 businesses were involved in the Deal Board pilot program, helping to refine the process.
“A good example of that refinement is that they [businesses] really wanted a way to bulk reassign tasks when people leave the business or someone goes on holidays.”
Furnell said Deal Board provided simpler ways to manage automation and process guidance, allowing businesses to ensure the same, excellent experience for every client, even if handled by new members of staff.
“It’s easy to see who in the team has completed what activity and exactly what is to be done next.
More tech upgrades – SmartData and Quickli
Deal Board’s launch at Scale-Up follows on from LMG’s other tech innovations unveiled this year, including SmartData and the integration of MyCRM and Quickli.
SmartData
The aggregator said the introduction of SmartData in May 2024 was the biggest ever enhancement to the Online Fact Find.
Furnell said it represented a revolution in the way clients were onboarded.
“We’ve had the Fact Find for a long time, it’s a very successful tool but the onus was still on the client to fill out this enormous form. SmartData integrates with a number of third party services to automatically populate the fact form on behalf of the client.”
SmartData captures client ID such as drivers’ licences and passports, contact and personal details, bank statements and expenses, cash assets and liabilities such as credit cards and existing loans through a combination of the Access Seeker report and the statements themselves, without customers having to provide all this information
“It’s a pretty powerful suite of tools that makes brokers look good in front of their clients but makes the client experience easier.”
At Scale Up, Loan Market announced an extension to SmartData, involving a pilot with Verification Exchange, a new service through Equifax.
“It pulls pay as you go, income and employment records from their service into MyCRM,” Furnell said. “It does all the work of supplying the employer details and the income without the client having to do anything.”
Quickli integration
LMG has also unveiled an industry-first aggregator integration with Quickli, a highly popular loan calculations and serviceability tool, used by many brokers in the industry.
The integration pushes more than 200 data points from MyCRM to Quickli – including income, assets, liabilities and expenses data - eliminating a double-up in processing when building an initial scenario.
“Quickli’s integration saves our brokers time by centralising research activities within MyCRM rather than having to move between platforms,” said Furnell.
