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La Trobe Financial continues to enhance and streamline its digital offering to brokers with another market-leading initiative to improve turnaround times and deliver a faster, more seamless customer experience.
In an industry first, La Trobe Financial now provides brokers with ‘self-serve’ capability to obtain commercial valuation quotes and instruct commercial property valuers directly through Valocity’s One Smart digital platform.
Cory Bannister, Senior Vice President – Chief Lending Officer at La Trobe Financial, said, “Through our broker research we identified a gap in the market where brokers were finding the ordering of commercial valuations extremely labour intensive and lacking any digital process, resulting in delayed valuations. We decided to partner with a proven commercial expert to find an alternative and digital solution for the commercial industry where we could give more ownership to our brokers and improve the turnaround time on valuations.”
The partnership provides La Trobe Financial and mortgage brokers with access to Valocity’s commercial valuation platform to automate its commercial lending and property valuation process. La Trobe Financial identified that a centralised commercial valuation platform would create significant workflow and process efficiencies, helping to speed up the instruction and delivery of commercial valuation reports.
On the release of the One Smart digital platform, Valocity Founder and Global CEO Carmen Vicelich said, “It’s more important than ever to be agile partners who can rapidly solve our customers’ problems. We’re proud to provide La Trobe Financial with this innovative digital solution to improve business continuity, streamline operations, and deliver best-in-class customer service.”
The platform went live for broker users last week, and the early take-up and feedback from brokers has been extremely positive. Award-winning commercial broker Petro Trianta from Podium Financial endorsed the platform, saying, “This is game-changing for commercial brokers. Not only does it significantly reduce wait times, it puts brokers in the driver’s seat much earlier in the process and helps provide more certainty for our clients. Commercial valuations have never been so easy to order.”
Chris Meaker, La Trobe Financial’s Head of Origination Channels, added, “Being a first mover in the industry with this technology, we were keen to receive broker feedback. Whilst we were extremely confident it would be well received, the proof is always in the pudding, and so we were delighted to receive an overwhelmingly positive response from our early users. We trust you will be excited about the flexibility this offers both you and your clients, facilitating a seamless digital valuation ordering process through Valocity.”Some of the exciting features of the platform include:
– Brokers are able to log on via their desktop, or access it via La Trobe Financial’s Broker Portal right in front of their client.
– Instant access to determine maximum LVR available for the specific property offered as security.
– Allows for real-time case tracking, eliminating time-consuming phone calls to follow up valuations, a significant time saver and efficiency-add for brokers.
– Brokers can input or request their clients to input their payment details online, eliminating the need to chase payments from clients.
– Ability to reassign to a different valuation firm.
– No more lost documents causing delays; brokers can reduce valuer turnaround times by uploading the documents directly to the valuer via the portal for easy and secure sharing.
– No offshore customer service centre; Valocity has local staff standing by for any queries or requests for assistance.
– Speeding up the quoting process and time to yes (functionality available in June 2021). Brokers can take advantage of this industry-first technology immediately by registering for access via La Trobe Financial’s Broker Portal at https://online.latrobefinancial.com.au/Login.aspx.
The Broker Portal also includes a residential valuation ordering and quoting tool, live loan case tracking, product term sheets and all loan documents.
Looking forward and continuing its theme of innovation, La Trobe Financial is set to launch a new quote function for brokers in the second half of the year and further upgrade the Broker Portal so that brokers can upload documents via mobile and smart devices.
