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The integration of Loan Market Group’s award-winning technology platform ‘MyCRM’ with NextGen.Net’s ApplyOnline platform has always been core to its time-saving and frictionless lending experience. But this strong tech partnership is now also core to how the group is helping brokers prepare for a post best interests duty (BID) world from 1 January 2021.
“The upcoming BID legislation will place greater emphasis on broker documentation and due diligence processes throughout the customer experience. So we want to make sure what we have in our MyCRM platform aligns with brokers’ compliance needs, while creating a fantastic customer experience,” said Loan Market head of product management MyCRM, Mathew Camp.
“By working with NextGen.Net, we’re maximising the data captured through ApplyOnline, along with their ongoing platform enhancements, so brokers can have complete confidence prior to lodging that they are within healthy margins from a compliance perspective.”
Loan Market chief operating officer for its MyCRM Division, Joanne Church, who was one of the key leaders during the development and evolution of MyCRM, reaffirmed NextGen.Net’s long-standing partnership and proactivity in responding to Loan Market’s business needs.
“An example of this is a recent project that we’ve been working on with NextGen.Net to improve the way we map expenses,” Church said.
“There’s been a keen spotlight on analysing customers’ expenses and ensuring they don’t go into hardship, and it’s been a really complex process because every lender wants it slightly differently, and customers don’t always understand what you’re asking for.”
According to Camp, the project came about from both broker feedback and the legislative environment – both factors which highlighted the the need to evolve and capture expenses.
“We wanted end customers to have the ability to declare expenses, ideally using tools upfront via our customer portal, and then have these flow on through to the lender without too many touchpoints. The business requirements we finally arrived at were exactly what NextGen.Net were about to launch: their second update of Standardised Expense Categories,” said Camp.
“As a result, we were able to align on remapping the way our expenses work on our platform and how we capture those from bank statements and services upfront and flow them all the way through to submission via ApplyOnline.
“We’ve just released it, and so far it’s proving to be a great win for all stakeholders – brokers, lenders and end customers,” Camp added.
NextGen.Net Chief Customer Officer Tony Carn said, “Loan Market are leading the way in CRM technology for brokers and are ahead of the curve in utilising current capabilities for expense management.
“The next exciting step will be working together to leverage our recent acquisition of Frollo and their leadership in open banking to provide brokers with access to the Consumer Data Right [CDR] through ApplyOnline.”
Planned enhancements to the ApplyOnline platform that leverage the CDR will streamline the loan application process further and provide enormous efficiencies to brokers.
Determining ways to deliver improved efficiencies to brokers is Camp’s chief focus.
“The other time-saving tool we love to talk about is ApplyOnline’s ‘Compliance tab’,” he said.
“When NextGen.Net rolled that out it was a real win for brokers. Instead of having to fill in the Broker Interview Guide, they were able to do it digitally within our MyCRM platform and pass it through to ApplyOnline seamlessly.
“Now we’ve taken it a step further and brokers can use our new Goal Setter tool to capture customers’ requirements and objectives during an appointment and have these saved straight into our MyCRM platform,” Camp continued.
“There’s also a big push post COVID-19 for loan documents to be signed off on platforms, avoiding the need for paper and wet signatures. NextGen.Net is doing a great job in driving this change across all lenders with its new ApplyOnline ‘eSign’ tool that helps us remove a significant point of friction in current paper-based lending processes.”
Church added that “while tech-savvy brokers tend to be drawn to Loan Market, our culture is inclusive, and our platform is intuitive and easy to follow, with great ongoing training and support”.
“That’s why actively fostering strong partnerships with market leaders like NextGen.Net is core to helping us deliver on the ‘four promises’ we make to our brokers to save them time, keep them safe, help them find and keep clients, and grow their business,” he concluded.
