It’s incredibly difficult and, to a very large extent, firms rely on the technological know-how of those who are best placed to deliver in this area – so within a firm it’s the IT department, or perhaps if you’re an AR firm it’s the network head office; if you outsource your systems then it will be your provider in this area. Essentially, you are looking for a clue from these individuals and businesses about how technology is changing, how it might fit in with your business, what your competitors are doing in this area, and how you can best, and most cost-effectively, go about dialling in to these changes in order to secure a competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, technology changes so quickly and the way in which our customer base interacts with it (and wants to interact with it in the future), makes this much more difficult to do in practice than theory. Take for instance, the competition element of all this which should keep everyone on their toes when it comes to the systems we use. What are your local advisory competitors doing in this area? Are they at the cutting-edge in terms of their sourcing, management, marketing, customer communication systems? Or are they effectively utilising the same systems that 95% of the market is using?
In a way of course, it may well be that the greatest source of competition in this area isn’t coming from advisers at all; it’s coming from the lenders. Take, for instance, the recent announcement by Lloyds and Halifax that they would be introducing a live video link option for borrower customers in order to converse with an in-house ‘adviser’ rather than having to go into the branch. This is clearly a major move forward for the biggest lender in the country and, almost certainly, comes as a response to the increase in mortgage market share taken away from them by mortgage intermediaries.
But the big question is how can advisers respond? After all, the technological envelope is being pushed here by large corporate entities with even larger pockets, who believe this sort of investment and resource is required if they are going to claw back some share for their direct to consumer operations.
Now, advisers might sit and look at this and say (quite rightly) that there are some fundamental flaws with the entire direct-to-consumer lender package anyway, not least the fact that you can only access the products of one lender. However, let’s not entirely dismiss this out of hand – we’ll all be well aware of the dual pricing strategies operated in the market over the years and who’s to say that lenders, coupled with this new way of reaching borrowers, won’t be willing to up the ante with a return to those days?
The point is that lenders are not simply sitting back and allowing intermediary market share to continue to fly high – discount the (somewhat logical) argument that this resource and investment could be better spent on their intermediary systems and instead face the facts. Lenders want to even up their distribution share of business and they are quite willing to use advance technology to do it.
So, while it will be quite obvious, that for most advisers developing similar technology and rolling it out will be beyond them, there are ongoing, important improvements that can be made to what you have. Is your system necessarily the right one to move you into the next five years of your business? Does it successfully manage your workflow? Is it able to provide you with those all-important dates for future actions? Can it offer you a simple, easy to use sales structure that can take you through the process and is totally compliant? Can it offer you a range of marketing tools and customer communication methods to keep existing (and new) clients away from dealing with those lenders direct?
It’s often difficult to find the time to stress-test and future-proof the technology and systems you use, but it should be well worth the effort and the time. The good news is there are also plenty of off-the-shelf alternatives which may well make your life infinitely easier and will offer you the chance to update as advances are made. Now is not the time to make do but either mend what you have or update to a much newer model.
