Technology
The IT crowd
Technology can make your business work harder and smarter. Get with the IT crowd
by
Jamie Coats, sales director, Intelliflo
This is an IT article with a difference. I’m not here to write about GHz, hard drives and code messaging, I’m here to write about the practicalities of driving out costs and driving up revenue opportunities and looking at how you get control of your business and your clients. We are currently in the midst of some of the hardest financial times our country has seen for decades. Mortgage brokers have born the brunt of this and have for the past few years been dramatically reducing their costs where able and exploring alternative income streams. The robustness of your businesses models and the fact you have survived in the face of outstanding adversity is a huge accolade to you in the mortgage industry.
However, it would also be true to say that this hasn’t come easily. Those in financial services have to work harder, put in longer hours for smaller returns than ever before. In amongst this, new regulation keeps coming to make your roles more challenging, more demanding and take up more of your valuable time that should really be spent doing what you do best – speaking with clients. For mortgage advisers, the contentious Mortgage Market Review and the European Directive on housing
40 MORTGAGE INTRODUCER MARCH 2012
has meant a long period of uncertainty while the regulators determine what they’d like to monitor next. Whilst all this chaos is going on, you still continue to take care of your clients, with the right advice and the right products.
OBJECTIVES
The turbulent market and changing regulation cannot detract from the necessity to keep productive and profitable. Without exception everyone I talk to still wants the same: a lean operating model, which is scalable, without a correlating increase in overheads.
The days of having filing cabinets full of paper records should be long gone. Whether you’re part of a network which provides your point of sale system, a national or directly authorised firm, you should be keeping your client details and running your business on a secure IT system that allows you to manage your client bank. That system should also give you superb management information to allow you to run your business with minimal administrative costs and maximum opportunity to drive up revenue potential. Having access to all your client data, income and expenditure details and activity records at the touch of a few buttons keeps you in control and on the front foot.
COST
Of course the first question everyone asks about IT is: “How much is it?” This question is rather like saying how much does a car cost? There are endless answers depending on how
“Without exception everyone I talk to still wants the same: a lean operating model, which is scalable, without a correlating increase in overheads”
much ownership and responsibility you want for when it breaks down, needs servicing or needs replacing because of its age.
My first piece of advice when you look at a software solution would be to calculate how much you pay for the backup and contingency plans you need to support it. In other words the hard cash amounts. Research has shown that 60% of the cost of IT is the infrastructure you need to support it, that’s before it’s even done what you need it for.
Find out how much of the service,
repairs and updates the IT company covers and you can start to eliminate some of the significant costs. What can the system do, that you used to? You put a value on your time, so what amount is being saved by a system doing the work for you?
CLOUD COMPUTING A way to circumnavigate some of the aforementioned costs is to look at
www.mortgageintroducer.com
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