Q. What are some of the main ways the needs of larger enterprises differ from small business when it comes to business finance?
Andrew Wagg (AW): From an established business point of view, it’s all relationship-led.
You want to ensure brokers work on that initial opportunity, but also look at the long-term putting the limits in place, where they can continue to serve those clients, not just for that initial need, but for future needs as well.
Natasha Brown (NB): For a lot of small businesses, getting access to credit can be slow, complicated, and repetitive. We’re trying to find ways to enable them to get access to this credit easier and make sure that they’re able to sustain their businesses.
They’re often time-poor, and they manage their finances outside of business hours. They can’t necessarily make it into the banks or in the usual business hours. We need to be able to accommodate them and make it easy enough to understand what’s available.
Q. Why do larger businesses need relationship-led support?
AW: An established business would have a financial advisor or someone within the business make those decisions. It might not be just the owner. It’s about brokers having a conversation and being able to find out what they need now and what they could need in the future.
Q. Why does a digitally led model better support small-business customers?
NB: To serve our small-business customers well, we can’t do it the traditional way. We can’t expect brokers to go through that high-effort and heavy documentation process.
We are looking to enable brokers to acquire customers quite easily, serve them at a low cost, and keep them coming back. That’s probably the key thing that we’ve really focused on over the last 12 months – leveraging our capabilities as a business to provide that service to our brokers.
What we’re trying to do is give the broker an opportunity to engage with those customers, be the hero, really. Be able to reach out, whether it’s with a credit limit increase or product opportunity or even just information about what’s happening in their business.
A lot of the work that we’ve done through our platform and digital solutions is giving brokers a good reason to continue talking to their customers, so you maintain that relationship.
Q. How has Shift used technology and data to make the finance experience faster and more seamless for brokers and their customers?
NB: One of the core capabilities of Shift is our modelling and the fact that we stream bank data. The banking data gives us the ability to really assess the customer upfront fully around what’s happening in their business and beyond.
It also gives us the ability to manage how that customer is tracking. So, if we see that they’re going really well, it gives us an opportunity to present credit limit increases or additional products and engage with the brokers on those particular opportunities.
Equally, if we see that things are not going so well, it gives us an ability to get in touch early and work with those customers to hopefully maintain that relationship and help them solve that problem or help them work through it.
AW: Streaming data is important to both segments. To give you an example, and I’m hearing this quite a bit as we’ve been setting limits in place now for 12–18 months.
What we’re seeing now is that second and third transaction coming through and how easy we’ve made it for them.
It’s really great to see that data we’re providing is helping the brokers turn those deals around quickly.
Be inquisitive, ask different questions to your customers around what their needs are, what are their future needs, are they looking to expand?
- Andrew Wagg, director – broker distribution, Shift
Q. Looking ahead, what message would you share with brokers looking to better support their commercial customers?
AW: Be inquisitive, ask different questions to your customers around what their needs are, what are their future needs, are they looking to expand?
And then from a Shift point of view, we’re open for suggestions. If there’s a problem out in the market and the broker feels we can solve it through our technology, then we’re happy to have those conversations, and we really encourage the brokers to reach out to us.
NB: Shift likes to solve hard problems. We like to hear about what the experience is for our brokers and their customers and their needs. We really do welcome the feedback and the opportunity to hear directly from people that are living the experience every day.
