By
The decision by Australia’s largest customer-owned financial institution, CUA, to move to electronic lodgement has received praise from Mortgage Choice.
Mortgage Choice CIO and General Manager Operations, Neill Rose-Innes says: “CUA’s shift to electronic lodgement will make it easier for our brokers, reduce error rates, increase through-put and boost efficiency.
“Importantly, it will also give a much better customer experience.
“We have 27 lenders on our panel and from a broker’s usability perspective we prefer that our lenders use the NextGen.Net ApplyOnline service and electronic lodgement because it makes the process much more efficient in that brokers don’t have to learn and use different lender-specific lodgement systems and processes.”
After CUA re-entered the broker market in February 2012 the obvious next step to support its broker channel was to shift to electronic lodgement.
ApplyOnline, now well-established nation-wide as the industry standard for electronic lodgement, was the clear choice says, Darrin Northey, Group General Manager Distribution CUA.
“ApplyOnline is a key part of the investment we’ve made into our broker channel over the past12 months,” says Northey.
“Since focusing on growing the broker-side of our business we have been very conscious of listening to what brokers say they need. This includes refining processes to be a lot faster in response and helping to service customers. A great deal of frustration comes from manually filling out forms.”
Investment in its broker channel is a primary focus for CUA and ApplyOnline is pivotal to its growth strategy and the primary driver is to make business dealings easier for brokers and customers.
Included in the CUA strategy has been taking on a national manager for brokers, putting in place six business development managers to work directly with brokers and adding broker support staff to the back office.
Efficiency, turnaround times and ease of process were key issues that Northey wanted to address and ApplyOnline had the goods to deliver the result he was after.
“NextGen.Net has a very strong name in the industry,” says Northey. “Plus it has a great relationship with organisations that our broker teams deal with, so it was an obvious choice.”
Rose-Innes maintains that given the impact of margin squeeze, efficiency of process and productivity are vital. “The likelihood of omissions and errors is much lower in the ApplyOnline scenario,” he says. “It stands to reason therefore that the more lenders that use ApplyOnline the better it is for
our brokers.”
Besides enabling Mortgage Choice franchisees who deal with CUA, to now leverage the efficiencies of electronic lodgement, ApplyOnline opens the door for Mortgage Choice and CUA to broaden their distribution opportunity, get in front of more clients and write more loans, says NextGen.Net Sales Director,
Tony Carn.
Carn suggests there is a direct correlation between lenders who are serious about third party distribution and committed to offering brokers efficiencies and tools to ensure quality at the point of submission, and consequently a superior customer experience and their investment in ApplyOnline.
“If you’re not there yet I question whether you’re serious about the industry,” he says.
Developed by NextGen.Net, ApplyOnline® is the premier electronic lodgement system in Australia.
