Getting your business on line is no longer the intimidating and expensive worry it once was. With the early promise of the Internet becoming reality, the web now offers brokers a simple way they can deliver better service and maximise its efficiencies to make more money.
It’s probably ten years since I first heard about the internet, started surfing the web and sending emails over a painfully slow dial up connection, on a PC that was also painfully slow- when it wasn’t crashing, that is.
Five years ago, when our secured loan company Yes Loans & Mortgages (YES) was founded, the buzz word was e-commerce and it looked as if the future was all about the fantastic growth of internet companies.
The crash in Internet stocks that followed was sobering – devastating even for many who had invested heavily in the bubble – but the underlying promise of the internet as a platform for delivering amazing business development opportunities, though untested at that time, has proved to be remarkably sound.
Now e-commerce is really coming into its own. On-line purchasing is threatening the future prospects of the High Street retailer and nearly everyone now has a story to tell about the great bargain they picked up on Ebay.
So a revolution that started with such a fanfare only to get severely knocked back by the markets has actually now come into its own. There isn’t a business out there, in any sector, which can afford to ignore the opportunities that operating on line have to offer.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the financial retail sector, in mortgages and – increasingly as important – secured loans.
More and more people are turning to the internet as their first port of call when researching the options available to them. And we are seeing customers turning to their computers as a first reaction to marketing materials wherever they may come from.
Be it direct mail or television advertising an increasing percentage of customers immediately get on line to get further details of the company they have heard from.
They will also surf using search engines to check out the competition and so an increasingly significant percentage are actually looking at their screens when the make the decision to go with one provider or another.
It makes perfect logical sense, therefore, to make the whole application procedure available to them in the same space where they already are. As we all know, the smoother and quicker the processes that lead an inquirer into an applicant result in a higher percentage take up. And the fact is that more and more people want to work in this way.
So, while it is understandable that brokers may be cautious of new developments in e-commerce and it remains the fact that a lot of applicants still use the telephone/call centre application process, is it nevertheless a source of concern that so many are missing out on what on-line marketing and processing can offer.
Of the 25,000 or so brokers operating in the UK market the overwhelming majority - as many as 80 per cent - still do not have a website to help them take advantage of this new way of working.
These are the businesses that are in very real danger of missing out on the fantastic opportunity now represented by the secured loans. Once the black sheep on the financial services industry, secured loans are becoming an essential ingredient of the serious broker’s offering.
The reasons are several, but perhaps most importantly that it is becoming more and more apparent that a secured loan is the best borrowing option for your customer because of falling interest rates, low set up costs, and no valuation fees.
When people are encouraged to remortgage over a twenty year term to, say, consolidated thousands of pounds accumulated in credit card debt, the true costs of the total repayment are easily blurred. A recommendation to do this by a broker as opposed to considering the option of a secured loan is simply not best practice and is to the long-term disadvantage to the customer.
After all, what does the customer want when, for example, they want to raise £10,000 to buy a new car? To pay it off over twenty years, when the car is a distant memory and has long since been recycled in a Chinese foundry? Or to have the debt tied in to a three year cycle that matches that of the depreciation of the car itself?
Then there is the added cost of payment protection plans. These are treated very differently in respect of secured loans to the way they are with a remortage and your customers will be delighted to hear why.
That is because many lenders are following the lead given by First Plus and offering to refund the whole of the cost of payment protection premiums after five years of instalments have been paid without a claim.
So this is a significant bonus for the secured loans customer who can achieve the peace of mind they need in knowing that they need not worry about defaulting on their loan but also that, if they don’t, they get their premium money back. For the remortgage customer such five year windfall never arrives.
Because of this, the marketing organisation Datamonitor is predicting the secured loan market to increase by a staggering 80 per cent over the next three years. So the challenge to brokers must be this: how on earth are you going to be able to handle such an increase in business if you don’t go on-line?
Part of the reason that smaller operations have been reluctant to do so is that the thought of designing and operating a highly complicated bit of technological kit is just too much to take on board when they have the day to day worry of running their business.
So it is for that very reason that YES has been among the first packagers to develop its very own on-line tool kit for brokers who can now get into the world of the internet for minimum cost and with minimum hassle.
We have developed a marketing suite that can be supplied off the shelf. Brokers have the choice to have a bespoke package made up depending on their needs. So as well as a website which can be adapted from a template of designs to give a highly individual look, brokers can also have accompanying flyers, direct marketing leaflets, ad designs and posters all in the same design. Beware, however, of free alternatives that see the packager registering your URL in their name and effectively using your goodwill for their own profit-making. Such ‘free’ websites can cost you dearly in the long-term.
We’ve teamed up with our creative design partners to put together a compliant advertising solution, personalized with your company colours and logo. With four distinct styles choose from, you can be sure you'll have up-to-date and compliant marketing products to use.
Put them all together and you get a comprehensive marketing suite that is fully compliant, and yet is personalised to your businesses and incorporates your own brand identity. It provides the tools for your on-line marketing presence as well as the templates for traditional print based marketing media.
The service also has additional features such as YesTrack which enables both brokers and their customers to directly track the progress of an application that has been sent to Yes Loans and Mortgages. This is a highly popular and time saving because it means your staff are not having to deal with application status inquiries but can use their time more profitably developing new business.
For brokers who are already up and running with a website there is a product called WebLink that will enable them to submit applications to YES on-line with the addition of bespoke software that is easily installed and sits alongside their existing site.
This is a piece of magic code which, having spent 10 minutes setting it up, allows you to offer secured loans through your existing website without having to get involved again. Your client clicks, you get a copy and so does your contact in YES, we process and then send your commission – our average commission in August was £1435. Over 270 introducers have registered for WebLink to date, making it our most successful web based product so far.
Once you are using internet applications as part of your everyday operations the advantages will immediately become apparent.
First of all you will realise that underwriting decisions become virtually instant. This is probably the most important way in which the application procedure is dramatically speeded up, to both your and your customer’s immense satisfaction. It means that if you need to resubmit, the customer can be told immediately so the prospect if far less likely go cold through waiting and neglect.
With the customer submitting their application on-line, this means your staff’s time is not taken up in a ‘double key’ operation whereby all customer application details have to be done in duplicate. In itself, as well as saving time, it cuts out the risk of errors creeping in to the application which will necessarily bring the application procedure to a grinding halt. After all, it is a near-given that an applicant will get their own address details right, but oh so easy for a team member to key in the wrong letters of a postcode, say, which will gum up the application until it is corrected.
In round terms it is our experience that brokers can achieve a 25 per cent time saving on applications that are submitted on-line. Put another way that gives your team an extra 25 per cent more time to chase new business or be deployed in other essential ways.
And it has never been simpler to register with us, which of course you can do on-line by a visit to our website www.yesloansnoworries.com. Registration is instant as long as your can supply us with your consumer credit licence so there is no need to wait while agency documents are sent back and forth through the post.
When you get onto our website you’ll see the full range of our products and the many ways in which we help brokers develop more business. You’ll also see the fantastic range of our incentive packages and commission schemes.
At YES we pride ourselves on leading the introducer secured loan market from the front. We offer our introducers quality products and services through continuous innovation and by listening to your needs.
