How to stop rekeying car finance applications into every lender portal
The same customer, the same car, typed into four lender portals. It’s slow, it introduces errors and it’s avoidable. Here’s how brokers are cutting it out.
Watch an adviser at a busy car finance brokerage for an hour and count how many times they type the same date of birth. It’s usually more than you’d think.
Rekeying applications into lender portals is one of those costs nobody budgets for. It’s just “how it’s done”. But it adds up in three ways.
What rekeying really costs
Time
Five to fifteen minutes per lender, per application, depending on the portal. Multiply by the number of lenders you try per deal and the number of deals a month, and it’s often days of adviser time every month spent copying.
Errors
Every time someone retypes an address history or an income figure, there’s a chance of a mistake. Mistakes lead to declines, referrals, or worse, a deal approved on wrong information that unravels at payout or later.
Credit footprints and declines
When rekeying is painful, brokers tend to send to the lender they know rather than the one most likely to approve. And when a deal is sent to lenders that were never a good fit, the customer’s credit file collects searches for nothing.
Step one: match before you send
The cheapest application is the one you don’t send. Before anything goes to a lender, check the deal against each lender’s criteria: age of vehicle, loan amount, term, deposit, employment and residency rules, credit profile. Then use your rate cards to see which lenders are realistic and what the customer would pay.
Done well, matching narrows five possible lenders to the two that are worth trying, and tells you which to try first.
Step two: send by API where you can
Many lenders accept proposals electronically from broker systems. When your CRM is connected, the application you’ve already completed goes to the lender in one step, and the decision comes back to the deal automatically: approved, declined, referred, with any conditions.
That removes the typing, and the errors that come with it. It also means the decision is recorded on the deal, with the time it arrived, rather than sitting in a portal you have to log into to check.
Step three: record everything else properly
Not every lender will be connected. For the ones that aren’t, the next best thing is recording what was submitted, when and with what result, on the same deal record. That way your view of the deal (and your reporting on lenders) stays complete, whichever route it took.
Step four: let the decision drive the next step
When a decision comes back, the work that follows should start by itself: the customer is told, the documents that lender needs are requested, and the deal moves stage. If an adviser has to notice the decision first, you’ve lost time again.
Work out what rekeying costs you
A quick way to put a number on it. Take a typical month and estimate:
- How many deals you send to lenders.
- How many lenders, on average, each deal is sent to.
- How long one portal submission takes, start to finish.
As an illustration: 200 deals a month, sent to an average of two lenders each, at ten minutes per submission, is around 66 hours a month. That’s close to two weeks of one adviser’s time spent typing information that was already in your system. Your own numbers may be higher or lower, but they’re rarely small.
Questions to ask about lender connections
- Which of my lenders can receive proposals by API today, and which are coming?
- Do decisions, conditions and pay-out notices come back automatically?
- Can I send quotes and pre-approvals as well as full proposals?
- What happens when a lender’s criteria or rates change?
- For lenders that aren’t connected, how do I record what I sent and what came back?
What brokers notice when they stop rekeying
- Advisers spend their time on customers rather than on portals.
- Fewer declines, because deals go to lenders that fit.
- Cleaner data, because the application is entered once.
- Better lender reporting, because every submission and decision is in one place.
How DealStack handles lenders
Lenders in DealStack covers matching, rate cards, sending and decisions on the deal. Lenders connected to DealStack receive proposals, quotes and pre-approvals by API, with decisions returned automatically. For every other lender, submissions and decisions are recorded on the deal, so your reporting stays complete.
Want to see a deal go from application to lender decision without retyping a thing? Book a demo.