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Steven Cross
Brokers are still struggling to come to grips with the increased workload that NCCP has inflicted on their business.
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While the majority of brokers recognise the benefits of operating in a licensed industry the burden of increased paperwork has had an impact on both the broker and the customer.
Terry Shoesmith from Home Loan Connexion believes clients are still overwhelmed by the paperwork they have to sign.
“You’re sitting there and you pull out these six or seven page documents and you’ve got three lots of them for different parts,” he said.
“Then you have the duplicates so you have six lots of documents which the client has to sign. And that’s not even the application.
“I think you could get it down to probably two or three pages and just have one document signed.”
“I can remember back in 2001, I could sit down with a client and could be in and out in three quarters of an hour. I was with some clients for three hours last night. And that’s pretty much all from extra paperwork.”
But not all brokers see increased compliance as merely a burden. Steven McClure from Mortgage Wisdom sees benefits for his business in a more regulated industry.
“Compliance adds professionalism to what we’re doing in the eyes of the client. The fact you’re presenting a well prepared form, that’s not hand written looks professional.
“And as with any form, you don’t read it word for word to a client, you point out all the important parts and then ask if there is anything wrong. But at least I’m presenting something to them, whereas before compliance, clients got basically nothing from some brokers”
Mr McClure has developed his own documentation template using Microsoft Word, which automatically populates itself.
“When all the changes went through I spent a lot of time setting up a good format for my compliance documents. So then it made it easier later on.
“I’ve got a compliance document that’s 17 pages long. In that it has credit guide, the quote, credit rep details and also I do the fact-find part A and B, and in that, my document calculates whether or not it’s not unsuitable. It also calculates repayments.
“Does all of that, so I find completing the whole document takes me 10 to 15 minutes, and that includes everything.”
“The secret is to get good compliance documents, because I’ve seen compliance documents from some aggregators that might have four or five different documents – a lot of them hand written”
Mark Hewitt AFG General Manager Sales and Operations believes the level of support provided by the aggregator can play a major factor in reducing the pressure brokers feel under the NCCP regulation.
“I think you might find those complaints are coming from brokers who’s aggregators require them to produce information into the system a couple of times to produce the information.”
“Once the decision was made and the law came in, we got along to designing our system and looking for ways to make it workable for our brokers so they can cut down the amount of interviews they had to do and so they can produce the appropriate documentation and get the loan application in.”
