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Shore Financial’s Christian Stevens shares how working with both a processing and packaging team to manage new clients leads to a smoother loan journey.
The Sydney-based senior credit adviser and mortgage broker told The Adviser’s Elite Broker podcast that when he begins servicing a new client, his process is to meet the client or speak with them over the phone for an initial conversation, which is followed by him sending them an email requesting them to send him the required documentation for the home loan.
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Once the client sends him the documentation, Mr Stevens will examine the supporting documents and suggest the most suitable lenders for the client and their loan package.
This, according to Mr Stevens, is the processing side, for which he said there are three people onshore and offshore to complete these tasks, and added that he shares them with another broker in the Shore Financial office.
The brokerage also has a two-member packaging team offshore, who then prepares the proposals for the client, which Mr Stevens said can take three or four hours to complete.
Explaining the reason for a separate packaging team, Mr Stevens said: “If you’re doing quite a lot of businesses, it’s impossible to go out and get new business if you’re spending your whole time behind the computer pumping out proposals.
“So, their full-time job is just pumping proposals out. Once they’re done, they will then package it up and send the master notes across to the processing team in the office and they will get the application documents ready.”
Following this, Mr Stevens said he sends the documents back to the client, after which he would lodge the application.
“There’s a couple of moving parts, but basically the frontend and the backend (the frontend being the packages and the backend being the processes) work together to make sure that that conveyor belt is just constantly moving,” he explained.
Mr Stevens, who entered the broking industry three years ago, is on track to settle over $250 million in loans in the 2020-21 financial year, which he said he has built year-on-year.
He said time management and embedding a robust process (where the processing and packaging teams collaborate efficiently) to ensure that proposals and applications are completed quickly has been the key to writing that much volume.
Mr Stevens said that he also uses spreadsheets to record the status of his clients, including who may be settling in a particular month, ensuring discharges are sent in a timely manner, avoiding settlement delays, and tracking how long it takes to complete proposals.
“They need to be out within 48 hours,” Mr Stevens asserted.
“If they’re not, we need to understand why. Each month, we’re looking at performance changes, we’re looking at if we need to add additional people, we’re looking at what processes we can do better, how we can make things faster, [and] how we can streamline the existing process that we have.”
He concluded: “We’re always trying to be better because it’s very difficult to build the business if you’re doing things twice [and] if you’re double-handling things.
“It’s just making sure that the process is as streamlined as possible is important.”
To listen to the full podcast with Christian Stevens, click here:
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