Vote for Leeds Building Society in the Financial Adviser Service Awards
As a Society, we’re committed to providing a great service to you, so you can provide a great service to your customers. To do this, we’ve been developing our product range and innovating the ways you do business with us.
A great way to show you value the improvements we’ve made is to give us five stars in the Financial Adviser Service Awards by clicking the button below. Read on for a recap on some of the key ways we’ve supported you over the past 12 months.
Getting you up to speed
In the past year, we’ve made some major improvements to our new business processing technology. We launched Mortgage Hub in September, a completely new intermediary portal for new applications. The portal provides increased task automation, has administrator functionality, a document upload facility, live case tracking and a self-serve function.
We’ve also connected with XPlan and Trigold using Lender Connect. We intend to establish more connections later this year. All of which will reduce the repetition of manually inputting information when submitting cases.
Staying in touch
Despite working from home since March 2020, our BDMs have still been at the end of the phone, or on the other side of the screen. Our TBDMs alone managed 37,500 calls and 57,500 webchats. We did all we could to ensure that, despite the recent challenges, our BDMs could meet with intermediaries regularly. To ensure we provided a dedicated intermediary service desk, we employed more staff to provide updates post application in principle and application queries.
Keeping going
We’ve worked hard to make sure we stayed within the market throughout the coronavirus pandemic. A key part of this was ensuring we’ve the right amount of colleagues, working in the right areas. In 2021 alone, we’ve increased our Mortgage Lending Department team by 33% and our Service Desk by 50%.
We’ve also adapted, using desktop valuations alongside physical valuations to make sure we improved processing timescales to match an increase in demand.
Standing by our products
Throughout the pandemic, we remained at 95% loan to value (LTV) on Shared Ownership. In fact, we were the largest lender to do so. We’re now supporting members with 95% LTV products on houses and 90% LTV on new build homes. We’ve also improved our interest coverage ratio (ICR) for basic rate taxpayers when applying for Buy to Let (BTL) cases.
Remaining flexible
What’s important to us is helping people have the home they want, which is why we’ve grown our range to over 1,000 products.
Whatever your customer’s needs, we should have the product to suit, whether its Help to Buy, BTL, Holiday Let, Shared Ownership, RIO, or Interest Only.
We still offer a variety of fee assisted legal packages as well as free valuations on remortgage products.
What are you waiting for?
We hope this article has provided you with plenty of reasons to give us five stars in the Financial Adviser Service Awards, to do so use the buttons at the top and bottom of this article.