Having moved to being independent three years ago, after 24 years of working for a major bank, I actually found the job satisfaction enormous for two years. Maybe it is partly due to the increasing volume of business I take on, but the last six months have been made a misery by the lack of knowledge of lenders’ staff, which continually makes a fool of brokers in front of their clients.
I’ve always known that you needed to ring most help desks several times and obtain the same answer before you had a 50/50 chance of it being correct, but nowadays, many of the business development managers (BDMs) are just as bad. It’s not their fault; they are young and have to learn, as I did. It is the lenders who promote them to frontline positions because they are inexpensive and more easily brain-washed that are to blame. Fewer BDMs have any clout. Like Nigel, I suspect, my clients know I fight their corner very hard. Like me, he will make mistakes but we suffer the consequences. When a representative of a lender tells us rubbish, again, we suffer. They don’t.
In the last month I have had the following from three different lenders:
- Four attempts to obtain a correct Key Facts Illustration (KFI) from a major lender’s template. The information I supplied was correct. The final version was still not 100 per cent but was the best the lender’s system could do.
- I was told by a BDM, two staff members and two sourcing systems that my client could have their mortgage direct debited to an offset savings account. They can’t.
- I was told by a BDM that a home buyer report was charged net of basic valuation fee on their free valuations deal. It is not.
Des Platt
