“Most brokers can get a loan, but young professionals and first home buyers want more than that.
“Dealing with Gen Y is about building relationships, removing the stuffiness, explaining the process, and utilising smart, cutting-edge technology to make transactions quicker and easier.”
This advice comes from the director of Divitis Finance and Mortgage Broking, Dylan Salotti, an industry young gun who just over 18 months ago launched the first mortgage brokerage in Sydney to set its sights on young professionals.
Salotti was prompted to start his own brand because his experience as a novice
property investor using a mortgage broker was left seriously lacking.
“The broker was very professional and he got me the money, but there was a real disconnect.
“I’d worked my whole life trying to get the deposit together and he didn’t understand my needs and how nervous I was about the process,” Salotti said.
“He didn’t attempt to educate me. So although he got me the finance I didn’t feel any connection or relationship, or have any intention of relying on him moving forward.”
Salotti aims to challenge the stereotypical perception of a mortgage broker. This entails taking the client relationship beyond simply a business transaction and speaking today’s language, which he says means staying across the most up-to-date technology and explaining to borrowers how electronic processes benefit them.
“At Divitis we’re young, fresh and enthusiastic, and we use a lot more technology with cloud-based supporting documents and online applications,” he said.
“I use
ApplyOnline on my back end because I want every step I take to get me closer to paperless transactions. That’s my ideal for my business. One of the things I hate is having unnecessary paper applications on my desk. The technology is there and
NextGen.Net is doing great things to push that along, but the industry is still catching up.”
Recently Salotti attended a NextGen.Net Efficiency Training Course and was so impressed that he wrote to Divitis Finance’s aggregator,
Connective, heaping praise on the content of the course and urging
Connective to alert brokers to its advantages.
“In a one-hour session we went through
ApplyOnline and I was shown three or four golden nuggets to speed up the process. The training was extremely beneficial, and I think it’s a must for everyone, especially new brokers. If I had done this training within the first three months, it would have saved me so much time on submissions and answered a lot of questions around the process.
“It’s a big push to encourage brokers to become more digital and tech-savvy,” Salotti says.
“If brokers want Gen Y clients, they need to make it easier and quicker for them to transact.
“I want to encourage everyone to keep supporting organisations like NextGen.Net, who facilitate valuable change and help educate the industry to make it as tech-savvy as possible.”
NextGen.Net sales director Tony Carn admits his frustration at brokers who are resistant to change and still email supporting documentation – essentially because of the security issue.
“It’s high time the industry addressed the lack of security when emailing documents,” Carn says. “Some brokers don’t realise that emailing a customer’s documentation is an unsafe practice, and a growing number of applicants, especially the younger generation who are tech-savvy, would be horrified if they knew their payslips and bank statements and tax assessment notices were being emailed and unsecured.”
The NextGen.Net
ApplyOnline Supporting Documents service is a thoroughly secure method.
“That’s one of the reasons we’re refreshing the user interface for the
Supporting Docs upload to make it even easier for brokers,” says Carn.
“A lot of talk about digitisation focuses on mobile applications and the sexy bits at the front end. But in reality, the more pertinent technology advances happen behind the scenes.
“I wonder how many people know that incorporated into
ApplyOnline is a function that allows the identity of an applicant to be verified electronically at the point of sale using a service provided by the federal government?
“Many brokers don’t realise that they’re sitting on one of the most advanced technology platforms in the world. That piece of information would certainly go down well with Gen Y.”
