Login
ISCOVER
Club Financial Services director Kerry Cleanthous shares his story of how offering asset and equipment finance has helped his business evolve.
At Club Financial Services, we are a small finance brokerage of three brokers settling home loan volumes of around $100 million per year and have been trading for six years, based in North Adelaide.
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.
We have always offered asset and equipment finance to our clients on a very ad-doc basis, maybe settling five to 10 transactions a year, predominately for car finance.
As time went on, we saw a growing demand from our existing clients for an alternative to car-dealer finance options and we made the conscious decision to offer asset and equipment finance as a normal part of our service proposition to all of our clients – not just those that sought out a solution from us. We became more proactive and less reactive to what we saw as a growing need in our client base.
In more recent times, over the last 12 months, we have focused more and more heavily on asset and equipment finance and it has proven to be an excellent source of increased revenue, having partnered with Mildura Finance through their eChoice connection.
We are now looking at settling around five to 10 transactions a month, and we have seen a commensurate increase in our profitability accordingly, with a view to increase this to 15 to 20 per month in the coming year through a more streamlined process and some interesting marketing campaigns.
The process and support that Mildura Finance provide us as introducers is fantastic and allows us to deliver exceptional pricing to our clients, with an entire suite of lenders and various product offerings via the one channel. They can manage a reasonable volume for us and take care of the fiddly settlement process on our behalf.
Our clients love the fact that they can rely on us to coordinate their asset and equipment finance. We already have a great understanding of their circumstances and its saves them having to rehash their entire life story to another party. It has also opened the door to opportunities with younger clients, being the children of our existing clients. We can then deliver a great client experience to a whole new generation of borrowers, who will ultimately become our next wave of home loan clients. Having positively experienced our service for their car finance, we have no doubt that they will look to us for assistance with their property finance.
I think that in an ever-increasing competitive marketplace, being able to offer a more diverse but very related offering can only hold us in great stead for the years ahead and helps future-proof our business. We’ve financed a great number of cars, but also more obscure items such as speed boats, charter boats, commercial baking ovens, skip bins and rubbish trucks, crash-repair equipment and gym equipment. The expertise that our partners at Mildura Finance provide is integral to being able to manage the application process for such a vast array of assets and equipment.
Most brokers we’ve spoken to about asset and equipment finance think that it is too complicated, too hard or too onerous. From experience, we can say as long as you have a provider that understands your business model, that can’t be further from the truth.
First steps in looking to get into asset and equipment finance would be to contact someone like Mildura Finance and get a better understanding of the options that exist for you and your clients and the process that you’ll go through from client introduction, approval, sign-up and settlements. It is always a good idea to be fully informed about the process you are going to guide your clients through.
From there, the rest is quite easy. Just don’t be scared from offering asset and equipment finance as a normal part of your service proposition. Clients need an alternative solution and who better to deliver that solution than the person they already have a great rapport with like their existing finance broker?
