Self-employed borrowers an ‘untapped opportunity’ for commercial finance needs – Westley

Conversations you have today, could help build up a pipeline of work for when the market is less abundant in the future.

So, at Brightstar, we decided to look into, just how big an untapped opportunity there could be for brokers in commercial lending.

We undertook a study of a diverse group of just under 350 intermediaries, including different types of broker firms, IFAs, directly authorised brokers and appointed representatives, to find out how many spoke to their clients about commercial finance.

The research found that 44 per cent of brokers did take the opportunity to talk to their self-employed clients about borrowing requirements for their business, while the remaining majority admitted that they did not mention commercial finance.

Every broker has some clients who are self-employed and for every homebuyer or remortgagor who runs their own business there is potentially an unmet demand for commercial finance and the opportunity to help.

According to the SME Finance Monitor, at the end of Q2 this year, 16 per cent of businesses said they planned to apply for finance and 32 per cent said they expected to be applying for finance at some point in the future.

Untapped opportunity

So, most brokers have an untapped opportunity to forge stronger relationships with their clients and grow their business.

Even if you don’t have experience of commercial lending, working with a specialist distributor can help you to access the expertise and products that you need to provide your client with an additional service and diversify your offering.

And, by helping your clients secure commercial finance, you could be helping their business to grow and their personal finances to become stronger, which could in turn increase their appetite for mortgage borrowing in the future.

Multiple requirements

The reality is that your clients probably have multiple funding requirements.

While you may not be an expert in all of those, applying this principle to other areas of lending can help you to provide a more holistic service, resulting in improved client retention and word of mouth referrals.

So, however busy you are now, there are plenty of reasons to strike up a conversation about commercial finance when discussing mortgage requirements for with self-employed clients.

It’s these conversations today that could help boost your pipeline next year.