NACFB U-turns on lead generation plans after member ‘no’ vote

Adam Tyler (pictured), chief executive of the National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers (NACFB), received a majority ‘no’ vote in a straw poll of brokers at the Commercial Finance Expo in Birmingham when he asked if its involvement in producing leads was welcome.

Tyler said the NACFB had taken the decision to step into lead generation following calls to the association from customers. To deal with the enquiries, it set up its own finance platform, findSMEfinance, which produced £1m of leads a day when the service was a focus for the association. Tyler admitted that now the NACFB’s attention was rooted on its ‘road map’ of compliance and regulation, it no longer had the resource to run the service itself.

When Tyler asked for the audience’s opinion, David Whittaker, managing director of Mortgages for Business, said acting as lead generator had never been a success for the trade body.

“Getting involved in leads has never really worked, it throws up a series of issues and conflicts,” he said. “To have a broker map where a consumer can come to our site and say I’m in Hertfordshire, show me brokers in Hertfordshire, that is great. It fulfils the political requirement of Westminster that you can help consumers and SMEs find their way to finance.

“But every time you’ve done it [lead generation] before, it has either ended up in frustration or tears, or both. Unless there is a really compelling case for it, shed it and focus on your road map.”

One audience member said: “It is not the business of the NACFB to be involved in an activity which needs tight day-to-day management,” adding, “how we get our business is our business, it’s one step too far for the NACFB.”

Several proposals were floated during the debate, on how the NACFB should proceed, which involved the use of finance platforms to run the service, either exclusively for the NACFB or shared with other companies. It also suggested a U-turn to stop generating any leads, taking the trade body back to its original approach which offered a postcode finder for clients to search for the 10 closest brokers to their location.

In response to the result of the straw poll, which indicated members wanted nothing more than a location search facility on the NACFB’s website, Tyler said the trade body would act on this request and leave brokers to arrange their own lead generation deals with finance platforms on an individual basis.