Fintech firm Effi is to partner up with Finance & Coffee, one of Australia’s leading social platforms for mortgage brokers, with a brand new product designed to offer brokers unique access to Effi’s services.
The over 8,000 Finance & Coffee members will be able to purchase Effi Lite, a $75/month version of the Effi product that will give them access to RateCity, offer brokers a profile on that site and allow them to be featured as top brokers.
It does this without the extra costs built into Effi’s regular product, such as electronic bank statements and email automation.
“One of the things what wanted to solve for the broker community, and the reason that we partnered with Finance & Coffee, is that every broker is looking for a good lead source,” said
Mandeep Sodhi, CEO & founder of Effi. “If you talk to the mortgage broker today, they’re spending time with marketing agencies, spending an awful lot of money trying to generate leads from Facebook and Google, but it’s not building their brand.”
“One of the problems it solves for them it not being just a lead management platform, but also a we actually help you generate leads as well. One of the ways that we do that is that we partner with comparison websitea and we have a partnership with RateCity, where we control the whole infrastructure of how a broker is shown on their website.
“So a broker can say ‘look, I’m having a slow day today, can I get five leads or three leads?’ We can switch them onto our lead management tool, and within a matter of seconds their profile is uploaded on RateCity and as soon as they get enough leads, it is switched off.”
What attracted Effi to Finance & Coffee is the ability to get to the heart of this issue facing the broker community.
“We wanted to solve this problem of lead management,” said Sodhi. “The two features that that we’ve taken out of this product is the email automation, which is the email nurturing that they have in place for someone looking for first home loans or investor loans and we know they already have that and we don’t want to force them to use our automation, so we took it out.”
“Then also the electronic bank statements. The broker is saying to us that they are using another provider, so why do they have to use yours? We also understand that changing behaviour can take time, so you’re free to use your own provider and we take that cost away from the product. Hence, we came up with the $75 plan, compared to our normal product at $120 a plan, but which doesn’t have an email automation or electronic bank statements.”
On the back of 2020, it was important to Sodhi that Effi offered something that engaged with the broker community where they already were.
“We’ve always been focussed on the whole broker community,” he said. “One thing that we were looking for in a partnership is how to we help the broker community to be growing their businesses and increasing their brand reach. Finance & Coffee are the only ones in the market who are independent and are talking to the brokers, hearing their concerns, whether that’s lead side or lender approval times. There’s a lot of comment going on in that community and we understand the pain points. We wanted to be part of that and say ‘Hey, we want to actually launch a product that can help that community’.”
