Brokers prompted to consider ‘slice’ of specialist lending market

Royden D’Vaz, national head of sales and marketing at Bluestone Mortgages, explained: “We’ve developed a marketing communications platform that actively encourages brokers to help self-employed clients more often and, in the process, improve their value proposition, broaden their customer base and benefit from a new revenue stream. 

“The new creative campaign uses a slice of a watermelon to visually prompt brokers to question what ‘slice’ of the $4 billion specialist lending market they are tapping into. 

“This is a fun, quirky tool that supports diversification, and entices brokers to realise the potential of tapping into the SME market which equates to 69 per cent of the workforce [according to Civil Society Australia].” 

The campaign has been launched to help brokers provide solutions to the growing small- and medium-sized enterprise market, which Bluestone says has contributed to a 37 per cent increase in volumes of self-employed mortgages between the second and third quarters of 2016. 

According to the company, its products can help provide a line of credit to those who have been ABN registered for just three months (rather than the standard 24), which “benefits day-to-day operations by alleviating immediate cash-flow issues”. 

Mr D’Vaz commented: “We’re solely focused on specialist lending, and channel our efforts exclusively on providing brokers with solutions designed to assist and benefit more customers – especially for self-employed borrowers.” 

Bluestone has recently expanded its national team of BDMs and credit assessors to support brokers in finding a financial solution for the increasing number of self-employed and small business clients. 

Mr D’Vaz has previously told The Adviser: “Our BDM's are quite hands on and do offer to hold those brokers’ hands and walk them through the process, especially if they're not someone that's seen these types of deals before. I think they usually open up their eyes to new solutions.

“Brokers tend to think it's harder but it's just the same as writing a mainstream loan. But working with a BDM removes the fear, the uncertainty and the doubt of writing these types of loans and helping these types of customers.” 

He concluded: “Our team is geared to streamline the application process and help facilitate the best outcome for self-employed and small business clients, no matter what stage their business is at.  

“We encourage brokers to realise the potential of this opportunity and reach out to their customer base today.”

[Related: New broker offering targets ‘underserved’ SMEs]