It’s a familiar adage in professional working circles, so with Binder, we wanted to develop a mortgage adviser CRM document management system that sweats all the fiddly stuff so you can spend more time seeing new clients, building a profitable pipeline of work - and getting to spend more quality time with your family.
Simon Horsfall explains how Binder came about, and how the development team worked on creating features designed to save you time and improve workflow efficiency.
“Talk to anyone in financial services, or the more specific mortgage adviser industry, and they’ll tell you that one of the many challenges they face is keeping on top of all the admin and paperwork while balancing the need to remain in contact with their clients throughout their journey, from initial fact find to final product selection.
The challenges are made even harder during the current financial climate when there’s been a successive series of interest rate changes which, in turn, have led to lenders offering an ever-changing array of mortgage offers. When you’re managing a succession of mortgage applications, coupled with the demands of ensuring FCA compliance, it’s all too easy to become submerged in chasing a paper trail of documentation and messages.”
Time - there’s never enough of it
“As mortgage advisers with first hand experience of these problems, the biggest issue we wanted to tackle was how time seemed to just evaporate throughout the day - no matter how early the start.
And so we took a much closer look at what was causing the problem, and the obvious answer was that, for too many of us, we had the same 3 core issues:
- Not being able to identify (and therefore prioritise) the key mortgage applications that needed the most urgent attention
- Not being able to effectively farm out every admin-related task to our non mortgage-advising colleagues
- Being caught up in an endless spiral of client communications from a variety of sources - emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, phone calls.
So when we developed Binder, the key driver behind the features that we wanted to develop was our obsession with saving valuable time, wherever we could throughout the working day. We wanted to work efficiently, prioritising those clients who are eager to proceed, maximising your working day without hours spent after the official close of business playing catch up.”
Here’s a summary of Binder’s key time saving features:
- Firstly - easy access. Binder is designed to be accessed at any time and anywhere with a simple login. We really want Binder to become a natural part of your working day.
- Secondly - workflow management. We wanted to tackle workflow efficiency head on. So, Binder does this by highlighting the mortgage applications that have the most up to date progress with an intuitively simple system that makes it easy to see which cases need the most attention.
- Collated communications - with the ‘Chat’ feature we’ve amalgamated all your client conversations so that you’re not rummaging around numerous different sources for the most up to date communication with your client.
- Smart email communications - we wanted to take the hassle out of all those standard ‘request for document’ emails that you need to send to your clients. We’ve automated them so that these quick transactional emails can be managed swiftly, without taking up thinking time for other tasks. They’re also great for GDPR compliance.
- Lender communication. Binder enables you to have easy access to case/lender-specific information for easy access anywhere, assisting you with passing security.
- Compliance documentation download. We know that financial services compliance is another time-consuming process, so we’ve created a feature where all your documentation and client communications can be downloaded into a simple doc file for when you need to have your paperwork ready. There’s no limit to the number of cases you can upload, or the volume of documents.
- Organisation management hierarchy . With Binder we wanted mortgage advisers to be able to focus on their core job, providing compliant advice to their clients, without the distractions of continually having to own every part of every caseload. So, by allocating admin rights to key people supporting your work, they can focus on driving forward all the background aspects of each application so that each case gathers its own momentum.
Coming soon - links to Intelligent Office
The next big feature for Binder will be its seamless integration with the Intelligent Office platform which will enable users to link their Binder workflow and document management tasks with the wider IO interface.
“Essentially, we want Binder to become the benchmark for effortlessly simple client relationship management within the mortgage adviser industry. It’s no small understatement to say that our key motive has, and always will be, to save every valuable second of the day so that everyone has time to spend on the things that matter.”
Why not put Binder through its paces and see if it changes your work/life balance. Sign up for
a FREE 30 day trial today.
