Jordan Smith is a senior mortgage and protection adviser at Capricorn Financial Consultancy. He has been using the Smartr365 platform which provides financial advisers and their clients real-time property valuations, offers mortgage options based on affordability, and allows applications to be tracked online.
MS: What are the key changes Smartr365 makes to the shape of your day?
JS: Primarily, it lets me split down my client bank in any number of ways allowing me to organise my day a lot more clearly. I can quickly refine 3,000 clients into the exact people I want to speak to, for example, people referred by a specific agency, those taking a mortgage through a specific lender or who are using one specific conveyancer. With this level of detail comes a lot of efficiency.
The system connects with clients through the auto email function allowing me a lot more freedom to bring in new business safe in the knowledge that all my clients are getting very high levels of contact without any input from me.
The way it plugs into other systems (Microsoft Outlook and Sharepoint) makes me use these a lot more effectively and there are lots of new opportunities to interact with my clients and introducers.
It allows me to present myself professionally with the agents we work with and the ability to access bank statements, ID verification and credit reports on behalf of the client is very efficient.
MS: How long did it take you to get trained and used to the system?
JS: Less than a week; the core functionality is extremely user friendly and very easy to understand. It can take a little while to realise the benefits of all the reporting but in terms of what it is there for, which is a system of managing clients, half a day and you are ready to go.
MS: Has it changed your caseload management?
JS: Typically, I have 60 or more cases being managed at any one time. Without a system like Smartr that would be completely unmanageable. I have an administrator so the benefits for collaboration on cases are huge – even if we are not in the same country we could very easily divide up workloads and manage our pipeline.
Inter-company referrals can be managed to a much higher standard which has big benefits on revenue; we have a dedicated insurance team in our office and it helps to be able to report on who has been passed across and share the case history with the adviser.
MS: Are there any lenders integrated with it?
JS: There are no fully integrated lenders yet but it is hoped to have four lenders on board by late summer, which account for 65% of the market. That will save another hour of time on 2/3rds of the cases submitted – about 15-20 hours per month, or almost 3 full working days.
MS: Which sourcing system do you use and how does this work with it?
I use Mortgage Brain which is not integrated. The advice is the only part of our process that is not currently automated as I take pride in the quality of advice delivered and this is how I differentiate myself from other brokers.
