The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of things in the lending market, and in some ways, has counterintuitively made doing business easier.
Read more: Shifting the balance
Smartline Hills District franchise owner Leah Nugent and Mortgage Choice Penshurst franchise owner George Boustani spoke about the main technology changes in their business over the past 12 months.
“As terrible as COVID is, I think it has revolutionised the interaction between the loan writer and the customer,” Boustani said. “The experience is now far better. It's been a blessing in disguise, there's no doubt about that.”
Boustani said it was almost unfathomable that two years ago, clients could not sign mortgage documents electronically, but lenders and aggregators made it happen during the pandemic.
“The Mortgage Choice Broker Platform also allows us to give our clients a portal to upload their documents, meaning they don’t need to photocopy or print or email,” he said.
The change has improved the broker experience, making the processes more time-efficient, appointments quicker, and compliance easier with more automation to record client interactions, Boustani said.
Nugent agreed. In 2019, meetings often tended to drag, but thanks to the introduction of Zoom and other video conferencing apps in the workplace, brokers can now hold comprehensive client meetings in less than 40 minutes.
Technologies such as DocuSign, which Nugent could not imagine doing without, has not only allowed business to be done remotely, it also substantially reduced paperwork and saved time. The reduced carbon emissions and saved trees are an added bonus.
“The banks for years said, ‘we cannot possibly do this – there's too much risk’, and the second that COVID hit, all of a sudden we were able to do this,” Nugent said.
