A best-in-class technological solution, soon to be released by award-winning aggregator the Finsure Group, will eliminate double handling and digitise a host of time-consuming tasks.
“We’ve kicked off an internal project with NextGen.Net – a new technology piece we’re building that will circumvent the current double handling of documents,” says Simon Bednar, General Manager of Finsure Finance & Insurance and LoanKit Aggregation.
“At the moment when a broker uploads documents into Infynity they have to download them a second time and put them onto their hard drive before they can upload them into ApplyOnline.
“This new piece of technology will enable the documents to be sent concurrently – similar to email attachments – and appear automatically in ApplyOnline.
That will go a long way to saving time and effort for the broker.”
The solution will also incorporate their new customer portal. “That’s important to mention because it’s where NextGen.Net and Finsure work really well together,” says Bednar.
“Our customer portal will allow customers to upload their own documents on behalf of the broker. The broker will see the documents immediately in Infynity, confirm they’re correct and hit a button to send them to ApplyOnline along with the application data. They’ll go across immediately.”
Bednar estimates that this will result in a time saving of “around 50 per cent” because, as he explains, “as part of that process we have a tax file number and sensitive data reduction piece of technology”.
Key integrations between NextGen.Net’s ApplyOnline and Finsure’s cloud-based broker CRM platform Infynity streamline and automate processes, dramatically saving time and cutting costs.
Bednar speaks of the responsiveness of the NextGen.Net team in relation to what Finsure wants to achieve.
“Recently we sat down with our NextGen.Net national Customer Account Executive Greg Phillips and discussed what our IT landscape and roadmap look like. Greg was very accommodating in identifying new opportunities and suggesting solutions we may want to consider. All of which I’m finding very useful and helpful.”
Phillips says NextGen.Net and Finsure share the same vision, “to digitise and streamline the entire mortgage lending process”, and that the seamless integration of ApplyOnline with Infynity is “a holistic solution for their brokers”.
“We work collaboratively with Finsure to ensure our systems talk to each other in a highly sophisticated manner to eliminate double handling and streamline the process from point of sale all the way to the lender’s approval,” Phillips says. “In terms of strategic planning, we look at Finsure’s roadmap and, as much as possible, align it with our roadmap.”
Bednar says he runs ideas by Phillips and laughing adds, “Greg will then sanitise them”.
“It’s very useful,” he says. “We are a very entrepreneurial business; we own and control everything we build. Consequently, we’re able to move a bit quicker than other platforms. Quite often when I say to Greg, have you thought about this or can we do this, he comes back to me and says, you won’t believe it, but we’ll be rolling something out later this year that does exactly that.
“That’s where the relationship works really well strategically.”
Keen to take advantage of what open banking, the Consumer Data Right and NextGen.Net’s acquisition of Frollo might mean for the business, Bednar is excited about brokers being able to access borrowers’ data directly from banks to inform an application.
“That’s exactly what I’m looking for, to have as little third-party integration and interaction as possible.
“It was great to see that NextGen.Net had that breadth of knowledge outside of submissions,” he says.
Relying on Finsure’s relationship with NextGen.Net to cover “efficiencies and accuracy”, Bednar says ApplyOnline “carries the burden for ensuring the data that banks want is there and accurate”.
“That’s a huge piece of work in itself,” he exclaims.
“We keep our platform open to allow brokers to be a little bit more fluid in how they collect the data, and the idea of them sending it to NextGen.Net is great for me because they effectively become the quality insurer and checker that allows our system to be efficient and accurate so when it goes to the lender the data is complete.
“From a strategic partnership perspective that’s powerful. It enables me to focus on what I do well, provide business value to the broker, and them to do what they do really well, which is about data accuracy and efficiency.”
