When the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) introduced the new Consumer Duty regulations on 23 July of last year, it placed even greater onus on mortgage advisers, mortgage brokers and other financial services providers to ensure that they’re achieving the best possible outcomes for their customers.
The significant aspect of these regulations is that the FCA expects firms “to make sure, and be able to show us, that they’re acting to deliver good customer outcomes.”
In its Consumer Duty guidance, the FCA highlights the four outcomes which they regard as representing the key elements of the relationship between a firm and its customers. These are:
In practice, this means putting customers at the heart of their business, by providing products and services that meet their customers’ needs, and offer fair value.
And, perhaps, most importantly, communicate and engage with customers and engage with them so that they can make effective, timely and properly-informed decisions.
As mortgage advisers ourselves, we know that one of the biggest challenges facing all industry professionals is the shortage of time. Face to face client meetings, coupled with ensuring you have the latest mortgage offers to hand, plus mountain-loads of mortgage compliance admin, can lead to a sense of being overwhelmed - and 9-5 working days stretching with early starts and late finishes. With the FCA placing a big emphasis on the ability to evidence customer care, the Binder mortgage adviser CRM system comes into its own in several ways.
We know this is a major headache. Multiple messages coming from multiple sources, from multiple clients. Because tracking and maintaining them eats into your working day, our Live Chat function provides a single portal for all your client communications. And in terms of supporting consumer duty, these can all be downloaded into a single document file at any time.
With our admin functions, Binder allows you to give tiered access to your portal to different people in your organisation, so that admin tasks such as chasing documentation can be undertaken, uploaded and securely stored, by non-client-facing members of your team. Again, this frees up time for you to focus on quality time with your client, and also in searching for the best products, deals and offers to meet the individual needs of each customer.
As we’ve explained earlier, the FCA’s approach to consumer duty is that it expects to see hard evidence that customer care, fact finding and due diligence around providing clients with the advice to meet their needs, is available for them to see. Again, this brings us back to the vicious circle of mortgage advisers juggling with the competing demands of managing communications from so many different sources - WhatsApp messages, texts, emails, even hand-written correspondence.
With Binder’s Live Chat feature, all your client communications are captured securely on the portal and can be downloaded at the closure of the case for use as an audit trail of all your conversations.
As we know, mortgage advice is only part of the picture. One of the other big challenges of our job is finding the time to offer clients a range of all-important protection advice too. Sourcing the range of products on offer for life, income and critical illness cover is time consuming and, with regard to Consumer Duty, you need to be able to evidence due diligence around fact finding and offering the right solution.
For company directors and managers, having a CRM system that frees up time to ensure your advisers have sufficient research and client time to be rigorous in their advice, is a major advantage. This is where the admin functions play a key role in enabling mortgage advisers to focus on client-facing conversations, while other members of your team can use Binder to manage the flow of documentation and admin checks.
Data input is another area where time is lost due to navigating your way around information systems to ensure all the necessary application information is correct.
Currently in its Beta testing phase, we’re now finalising our integration with the Intelliflo interface - one of the largest sales and information management platforms used by financial services professionals.
Integration with Intelliflo (IO) will mean that Binder users will longer need to double key their IO data entries. By uploading and synchronising its data in IO, Binder users will be able to work through caseloads even more efficiently and quickly. The result will be a seamless migration of data into the key fields that matter to mortgage advisers.
“Binder is all about resolving what we see as the two major challenges facing mortgage advisers: saving time and improving workflow efficiency. The FCA’s new focus on consumer duty simply makes the case for being more efficient, and timely in the preparation of supporting evidence, even more compelling.
Perhaps the most important feature of Binder is its simplicity. We’ve designed it as an access anywhere, anytime, mortgage adviser CRM portal that does much of the workflow thinking for you.” Simon Horsfall.
Quality not quantity. Ultimately, everything we’re aiming to do is to empower mortgage advisers and financial service companies to be as efficient as possible in the way they look after each and every one of their clients.
Each of the features we have designed is aimed at creating a series of significant marginal gains that, cumulatively, free up sizeable chunks of time to focus on the quality of customer service or, in the FCA’s words, “consumer duty”. More quality business with mortgage offers wrapped around protection, means more organisational profit - and also a genuine sense of having undertaken a professional, fully rounded job.
Why not see how Binder can help you change your workflow efficiency. Sign up for your free 30 day trial and see how it can make a real difference to the way you work, and frees up time to spend developing your new client bank.
