Not everyone shopping for a loan with a mortgage broker will meet lending criteria or be ready to buy, but discovering their creditworthiness can take a broker many hours of work.
No matter whether leads come from referrals, lead generation platforms, social media or the like, there is always some level of pre-qualification work that needs doing. There's the time spent on data entry. The checking of credit scores. The combing through income and expense data. The verification of identity. The chasing of unreturned documents. The telephone tag. The emails that bounce…and so it goes on.
Mortgage brokers who can understand their client's financial suitability and credit qualification in less time can accelerate sales and maximise return on investment. For this reason, data-driven digital mortgage broker tools and platforms are gaining popularity – creating automated and paperless workflows that reduce groundwork time for faster approvals.
Yet when these online systems don't talk to each other, mortgage brokers still face the complex and disjointed process of using different tools and platforms to gather the required information. Go here to access the client's credit score. Go there to verify their identity. Go elsewhere to retrieve their income and expense data. While there's no doubt that user-friendly digital alternatives are inherently more efficient than their manual counterparts, having to gather information from more than one source is an unnecessary time-waster.
Help to pre-qualify mortgage clients with summarised financial information from one platform
Fortunately, the advent of bank transaction data technology, combined with predictive analytics and market-leading consumer credit reporting data, has made it possible to provide quicker access to information relevant for pre-qualification. Equifax Fact Finder is leading the way as an easy and efficient mortgage broking tool to display a client's credit activity, income and expense summary and ID verification on a single dashboard. The tool integrates digital ID verification with biometrics and bank transaction data extraction.
Having adopted this innovative new technology earlier this year, the Mortgage Advice Bureau estimates it has halved the time to pull together a quick financial summary of a new loan applicant. Previously they had to gather and analyse the information themselves, but now this intel is automatically imported into a centralised platform. From there, it's straightforward for their broking team to identify if a lead is loan-ready and can be fast-tracked through to close.
Importantly, Equifax Fact Finder puts clients in the driver's seat to provide some of the most relevant information for the pre-qualification process in a way that is convenient for them. Mortgage brokers no longer have to hand-hold their clients through the task of supplying income and expense information or verifying their identity. Instead, time is freed up for higher-value tasks like servicing clients.
The clients' frustration of having to print, scan and email bank statements and identity documents is replaced with a smooth, frictionless process using the 24/7 convenience of a mobile device. For brokers, this user-friendly process and faster decisioning are becoming vital ingredients in building customer satisfaction and loyalty.
A financial snapshot tailored for brokers
With a snapshot view of financial health, mortgage brokers can more easily identify which clients are ready to progress and which clients have issues with credit or overspending. Equally, valuable time isn't lost on unsuitable leads, where it is evident from their snapshot financial summary that they won't meet lending criteria or need more time to improve creditworthiness.
The Equifax Fact Finder conveniently displays your client's credit score, adverse information, credit inquiries, and income and expense summary on a single dashboard screen. Also included is an instant calculation of monthly income surplus to help brokers make faster decisions about a client's potential borrowing capacity.
Cloud technology is used to drive customer-centricity. The client receives an automated consent request for third-party access to their bank transaction data for income and expense verification. Equifax Fact Finder collects and analyses regular/irregular income and expense data across multiple bank accounts without any more time or effort required of neither the client nor broker. Within seconds, a summary of salary, liabilities and living expenses displays on the dashboard.
If more detail is required, brokers can dig deeper into the income and expense metrics or pull down individual credit reports for sharing with other platforms. Real-time status updates allow brokers to see at a glance which applications are green status, indicating they are ready for loan presentation, or an amber status, signalling further investigation may be required.
Manage best interest duties with a trusted data tool
The Best Interest Duty (BID) reforms and an ever-shifting regulatory environment are helping drive digitisation in the mortgage industry. Brokers are turning to fast, easy-to-use tools to help demonstrate their best interest intentions and maintain compliance.
Equifax Fact Finder is at the forefront of technological advances for mortgage brokers, using trusted data and predictive analytics to improve the accuracy of the screening process. Vital information about your client's credit activity, salary, liabilities, living expenses and identity verification is available at the click of a button on a single dashboard. You're one step closer to understanding your customer's financial situation for targeted and relevant loan recommendations without any extra time burden.
Improve fraud protection with biometric ID verification
Businesses worldwide are faced with increasingly sophisticated fraud attempts, requiring more accurate techniques for verifying identity. The challenge for mortgage brokers and other small businesses is the need to introduce additional security controls to the qualification process without creating more friction for clients.
Identity verification methods that incorporate biometrics will play an increasing role in fraud detection due to their high trust and smooth user experience. Biometric verification matches a unique physical characteristic such as a fingerprint or face against a trusted identity document to confirm that a person is who they say they are. This process occurs in seconds without the friction caused by complex passwords.
Equifax Fact Finder enables mortgage brokers to reliably verify a client's identity using a digital identity verification process with advanced biometric technology. Your clients are asked to follow an SMS link to upload a selfie and scan their driver's licence using their mobile device. The biometric technology checks if they are a match and compares the individual's details, including name, date of birth, address and document identifiers, against an array of independent, reliable and differentiated data sources that only Equifax can provide. Within seconds, the verification check result displays on your dashboard.
Equifax continues to be an innovator in creating mortgage broker tools and platforms like Equifax Fact Finder. With experience showing that brokers who are quicker and more responsive to customers gain a competitive advantage, Equifax is committed to creating best-in-class digital experiences with trusted data that ultimately help put more Australians on the path to homeownership.
Find out more about speeding your time to close with Equifax mortgage broker tools and solutions. Contact Equifax.
