Targeting non-conforming clients

The year 2020 has been hard for many Australians financially. How can brokers target customers that are needing specialist help?

We’re the educator in this space, and we spend a lot of time helping brokers get across all the solutions we can provide.

The thing to keep focused on here is that “prime is just a moment in time”. So, when we’re looking to help brokers, we help them diversify into different asset classes across home loans, commercial loans, personal loans and asset finance.

We can get brokers up to speed on non-conforming lending and how they can broaden their customer base by attracting a wider range of customers.

We hear about diversification a lot, and it’s something brokers are really focusing on. At Pepper, we have an array of tools that they can use to help find more of these customers.

Why might someone need a non-conforming loan?

These are just everyday, hardworking Australian families who may not be able to get an approval with their preferred lender due to credit impairment, for example. There could be a variety of reasons. They could have experienced a life event – perhaps two or three years ago they were going through a divorce and they had a default that hit their credit file. So, that might not be a representation of where they are today, but that $10,000 default from a messy divorce a few years ago might stop them from getting a mainstream loan. Or it could be a client that is self-employed who’s had a strong amount of growth in their business and they’re looking to use alternative documents rather than tax returns to support their income. 

What sort of tools do you offer brokers to help them target these customers?

Pepper has spent a great deal of time on what we call ‘Market Smarts’, a tool that can help brokers identify clients who are in their area (or the areas they want to market to), so they can find clients more likely to need a 
non-conforming loan, 
for example.

We’ve collected information across three different areas: Equifax population data, consumer research, and our own Pepper data. We’ve been lending in Australia for 20 years, so we have a deep understanding of the market and can help brokers see how they’re performing against this market.

We’ve broken this information down into six groups, highlighting two of these key personas with a higher propensity for alternative lending. The first being prosperous blue collar and in-market families. These customers generally come to Pepper for things like home purchases, investment loans, alt doc and debt consolidation. The second is blue collar families and migrant populations, who may be looking for debt consolidation or alternative documentation.

We can sit down with a broker in their office and map out the areas where these clients live, the postcodes that they live, and help to develop a marketing strategy to assist the broker target these local clients that are looking for a solution outside of main lending.

How can brokers ensure that they’re generating leads in the shortest amount of time?

We understand that brokers can struggle with having the time to be able to do a marketing plan. They’ve got to be everything in their business. They’re running their business, meeting clients, doing their tax and doing their marketing. That can be quite challenging from a time perspective. Pepper understands this, and we’ve come up with a series of templates in our Alternative Lending Marketing Toolkit, which is available to accredited brokers on the Pepper Broker portal.

This toolkit, which our marketing team has put together, allows a broker to jump in and download some market-ready content that talks to the niches that we can help with. They can quickly and easily put their logo onto those templates, save it, and it’s ready to distribute straight out to market. Whether that be via their referral sources, or LinkedIn, or geographic area marketing through various media channels. We also have social media content with articles and social posts that brokers can publish on their website and social channels right away.

You can literally have something market-ready that looks like your business and sounds like a Pepper solution in two or three minutes. This can really help a broker save time and effort with their marketing and leave them to focus on talking to customers and generating more leads.

Are you seeing a lot of uptake in brokers using these templates?

We see the content being used day in, day out on multiple digital and social platforms. We know it works, and we know brokers are very open to using these templates and writing more business.

Having a wider range of solutions that can help more clients is only going to bolster a broker’s business, particularly if it’s in an area where they’re maybe seeing less business or less prime clients. This is particularly relevant now, as borrowers may be experiencing issues in the current climate.

Is this offering something that the broker needs to pay for?

It’s all totally free for Pepper-accredited brokers. These are the type of educational support mechanisms that Pepper puts in place to help our brokers.

We’re a predominantly broker-originated business; we’re deeply ingrained in the broker industry and passionate about supporting it. So, we’re happy to give back to brokers and give them all this information, give them a marketing toolkit, and give them access to an amazing BDM team across the country that can really help in not only positioning this type of lending with customers, but also educating brokers along the way.

This is all given to brokers for free, and they’re available through the broker portal. So, if you’re accredited with Pepper, you can quickly log online and access the marketing toolkit, access the Pepper Product Selector, and access scenario support. And it’s all 24 hours, whatever time you want to go and jump on, you can access it.

Written by Pepper Money

Last Updated: 14 March 2022

Published: 12 October 2020