Login
ISCOVER
Staff Reporter
Following a successful trial earlier this year, ING DIRECT has announced it will give all its brokers direct access to credit assessors from today.
To continue reading the rest of this article, please log in.
Looking for more benefits? Become a Premium Member.
Create free account to get unlimited news articles and more!
Looking for more benefits? Become a Premium Member.
ING DIRECT’s head of broker distribution Mark Woolnough said as part of the initiative, brokers will be able to discuss applications in the pipeline with their assessor prior to the deal being deferred or declined.
“We have had a very busy year engaging brokers for feedback, and a common theme that came out was around our lending policy and assessment, and ultimately the need to be able to discuss a deal in real time with an assessor. We listened to what brokers wanted, arranged a trial and the positive results where overwhelming for both the bank and our brokers,” he said.
“From the trial alone we’ve seen a 40 per cent increase in new applications being resolved without being sent back to the broker. In addition, we have been able to turn around a further 20 per cent of applications that would have previously been declined.”
“We’ve invested further in human resources to support this initiative, including the appointment of some senior assessors from outside the bank to bolster internal experience and service levels.”
Mr Woolnough said ING DIRECT hopes the initiative will help change some broker perceptions about ING DIRECT’s tight credit assessment.
“In the past ING DIRECT has had a reputation of only accepting ‘vanilla deals’, but brokers are finding nowadays this is not the case. I encourage brokers to send us those more complicated deals and give us the opportunity to make the deal happen,” he said.
“Feedback from brokers on the original trial that I have spoken to was that they were positively surprised to receive approvals on applications they previously thought weren’t ‘ING DIRECT deals’.
“This initiative puts us in a stronger position to accept more complex applications and will lead to more deals being successfully processed at ING DIRECT, which is a good outcome for the broker and the customer.”
