Designed to increase revenue opportunities for financial specialists and foster future growth

Name: Astute Financial 

Website: Astute Financial

Solutions: Salestrekker, LoanQ 

About

Astute Financial is a Financial Services   Aggregator offering a market-leading fully integrated financial services model. Established in 2000, today its membership base includes an estimated 600 finance, insurance and financial planning specialists across Australia and New Zealand. 

Astute Financial's long-held view is that having a diversified financial broking business is ‘good business’. For the Astute Financial team, this meant implementing effective technology solutions to generate a broader range of income streams from multiple sources for its financial specialist network. Their technology strategy would support greater resiliency and build a more sustainable business for brokers.

“We implemented Salestrekker around 2017 as a purpose-built CRM workflow ideal for asset finance and residential lending. Its helped power a tripling of our business. Adopting LoanQ more recently meant we could help our financial specialists more easily identify and create new revenue streams while still achieving a higher standard of compliance,” said Andrew Stone, National Sales Manager Commercial & Equipment Finance.

Realising the full potential of CRM Software

Implementing  Salestrekker meant Astute Financial could fine-tune the opportunities for more complex transactions. This was of particular value for the financial specialists already writing loans for asset finance. 

“We know that Astute Financial can deliver a time saving of 2 hours processing a single transaction because of Salestrekker,” confirmed Andrew.  

Additionally, Astute Financial implemented the LoanQ digital lender gateway to help brokers diversify their business and provide more support with compliance for consumer asset finance opportunities. 

"With the best interest legislation requirements, we wanted to make it easy and compliant for our financial specialists to process quotes and interact with the customer through loan applications. And that’s when we implemented LoanQ with Salestrekker. We aimed to simplify these processes, make them more accessible and fully compliant, and LoanQ does exactly that,” he said. 

Providing a broader range of financial solutions

Astute Financial wanted the Salestrekker CRM platform and LoanQ to help their financial specialists offer their customers a broader range of solutions. It would be compliant and streamlined and help financial specialists leverage existing data and avoid re-keying existing information. This combination of Salestrekker and LoanQ allowed Astute to work alongside its financial specialists and critically review the opportunities they had at hand. 

“With a transparent digital workflow for CRM and lending, we resolved the previous mystery of the flow of any deal and the associated compliance needs. LoanQ was instrumental in helping our financial specialists leverage their existing client base much better,” outlined Andrew.

Astute Financial has experienced an increase in accredited financial specialists establishing and expanding new revenue streams.

“We have found that with the right technology combination of Salestrekker and LoanQ, there is an immediate uplift to business outcomes. Our specialists can have broader conversations with their clients for mortgage, car and personal loan needs, leading to more meaningful discussions and profitable transactions.”

Creating an intuitive and compliant business platform

With the combined Salestrekker CRM platform and LoanQ digital lender gateway, Astute Financial financial specialists can accurately map and track their transactions. This gives business owners a more transparent and holistic view of their business activity. Financial specialists can efficiently access centralised information and technology tools that provide video conferencing, credit reporting and data security solutions with assured backups and data storage facilities. 

“Streamlined CRM processes and compliance support are also becoming mandatory for many brokers. Gone are the days when they want to deal with multiple CRM systems and not feel confident with the level of compliance support on offer. The total financial platform of residential lending and commercial and asset finance in the one CRM database is now the baseline for many,” he says.

Maximising the network’s potential

Astute Financial believes the ongoing development of Salestrekker delivering a range of enhancements and improvements is a great way to unlock future potential.

“Salestrekker is not a static platform, and we appreciate our collaborative relationship with the team. We feel they listen to our suggestions, which benefits us, our financial specialists and the industry at large," commented Andrew.

According to Andrew, two stand-out benefits of adopting Salestrekker and LoanQ in the current environment exist. The first is using the customer portal to efficiently and securely upload information. He describes this as a "significantly higher level of security" than in ordinary email traffic.

Additionally: "Salestrekker and LoanQ understand the need for API integration for direct lodgement. In fact, they are definitely well ahead of the market here. Mapping the platform and tools to lending workflows makes for smart business.” 

Results

• Create a highly intuitive, compliant and secure platform to streamline lending and customer relationships
• High levels of support for regulatory compliance with Salestrekker and Loan Q functionality
• Build greater opportunities and sustainable business streams with the Salestrekker platform and digital lender gateway, LoanQ