Brokers need to stop throwing leads away: MAB CEO

Noting that the UK market – where Mortgage Advice Bureau is a major broker network (with more than 1,800 brokes) – is booming at the moment, he added that leads were coming through to brokers thick and fast.

However, he said that while brokers were very good at converting mortgage-ready customers, there was a missed opportunity in helping those leads who were just starting their property-buying journey get to a stage where they are “proceedable”.

Mr Brodnicki said: “Brokers convert around one in 10 leads and they throw the other nine away. We also know that most of those nine shouldn’t be thrown away; here’s nothing wrong with those customers, they’re just not ready to transact right now.. 

“I’m sure [Australian] brokers are no different to ours in the UK; they want to speak to someone 30 seconds before they want to buy – 60 seconds is too far down the line. And often they’re not that great at keeping in touch with customers if they’re just not proceedable right now.

“So the next challenge is: how do we help these clients and know where they are in their journey and help them get to a proceedable position?”

According to the MAB CEO, these leads often contain a huge amount of relevant information but don’t necessarily require a broker’s help in proceeding to application at that stage.

As such, he highlighted that MAB had been “working on technology that allows us not only to intelligently nurture those customers… but provide real affordability tools so they can actually know that they can be eligible for a mortgage.

“It’s all just one short of actually speaking to a broker and get that former approval,” he said.

The tool, now available as an app to MAB broker clients in the UK and Australia (via MABSavers in Australia) is a personal finance management tool designed to help borrowers save up, plan, and track their home-buying journey.

It harnesses data coming in from leads input into MABrefer, which launched last year.

The consumers can use the tool to research deposit saving options, access affordability and mortgage calculators and utilise the app as a “digital mortgage coach”.

Once the borrower is ready to transact, the consumer can then choose to progress to application with a MAB broker.

Mr Brodnicki suggested that this type of data capture and lead nurturing would be key to help brokers capture more business and delight more customers moving forward.

“Every bit of data, whether it is positive, negative or neutral data, is helping us build a picture of our clients and therefore allowing us to be a lot more targeted, and a lot more successful in terms of how we communicate, when we communicate, the way we communicate what we communicate about,” he said.

“This is the most exciting thing to me in terms of what technology is bringing to the table. Because, in the right hands, in the right businesses, this gives us a huge opportunity. 

“I think the real revolution in mortgage broking, through technology, is how we capture these and take these leads that otherwise we’d have thrown away and how we retain and learn more about the existing clients that we have. That is truly exciting.”

[Related: Brokerage rolls out new broker tech offerings]