London leads the way for growth but risks abound
by Rory Traynor
We understand the challenges of commercial finance broking, the constant pressure to find clients which have:
- A solid commercial need for a loan; and
- The financial profile to fit lenders criteria
We understand that a broker’s key proposition is the ability to find qualified leads. With this in mind, Red Flag Alert has a suite of tools to help finance brokers find well-qualified leads.
Here are eight ways Red Flag Alert can help:
1. Build Sales Lists
Brokers with good marketing operations will use a mix of outbound and inbound marketing techniques: Red Flag Alert helps with both.
One key benefit of using Red Flag Alert is finding businesses to target. As commercial finance brokers, you probably have an ideal type of client that you can deliver great solutions for - perhaps it’s invoice financing, short-term working capital financing, long-term loans to established clients or delivering loans for a particular sector.
Using Red Flag Alert’s extensive business database you can start to target precisely the type of business that needs your help.
For example, you may work with lenders who specialise in invoice financing for the construction industry. Using Red Flag Alert, you can find construction companies that have poor liquidity ratios and target them directly with a set of highly relevant solutions.
Or you may be looking to offer low-interest loans to asset rich hotel chains that are growing quickly. Again, Red Flag Alert helps you zero in on those businesses and build highly relevant sales lists.
2. Qualify Leads Effectively
For finance brokers with a large number of incoming leads, being able to quickly qualify these leads saves a lot of time.
We know that some brokers are getting hundreds of leads each week and the time cost of speaking to every lead is high. It’s far better to automate the first phase of this qualification process.
Red Flag Alert is a highly effective tool for this qualification phase. Every business in the UK has a financial health rating that includes all publicly available information. Once all of the information is gathered and fed into Red Flag Alert’s database, a proprietary algorithm generates a score that indicates how financially healthy the business is and how likely insolvency is in the next year. Accessing these financial health ratings will help you discount businesses that don’t meet the first stage of qualification. Looking at gearing, debt, assets, business age and profit levels will be useful indicators for determining whether it’s worth moving a prospective client to the next stage of the qualification process.
3. Improve User Experience
Because commercial lending is so competitive our focus at Red Flag Alert is giving our clients an edge at every opportunity.
A key challenge that brokers face is delivering high-quality due diligence while making the process quick and easy for the prospective clients. There are many brokers in the market and making lending easy can be a key selling point. If a business faces an arduous on-boarding and due diligence process, this can be the prompt to take the business elsewhere.
Red Flag Alert helps brokers strike this balance: the detailed information held on every UK business and especially the credit referencing data means that due diligence can strike the fine balance between speed and thoroughness.
4. Flexibility
Brokers have complex businesses; with many incoming leads, client scoring and due diligence processes underway at any time, managing this data is challenging.
Data is a critical commodity for brokers. Whether it’s tracking the financial health of a business, accessing detailed company information or developing a new sales list, having the right information to hand is crucial.
Not only does Red Flag Alert collect this information and update it every day, a team of experts help brokers deploy the system in the most effective way.
They can help in numerous ways but here are a few keys areas:
- Helping build super-targeted sales lists.
- Setting up monitoring protocols to provide key information to the right people.
- Training teams to use the system effectively.
- Development of reporting processes that deliver key information to management teams.
- Dealing with any technical issues or ad hoc queries that teams have.
In short, Red Flag Alert’s value is so broad that our team make sure you’re utilising it fully to realise your business goals.
5. Real-time Credit Checks
With real-time data and sophisticated financial health ratings, Red Flag Alert is the perfect tool for client credit checks.
Some users make credit decisions based on the health rating; others use the health rating as a guide and then use the detailed information to make final decisions.
Brokers find the Red Flag Alert data a useful tool when introducing potential leads to lenders. If a broker can quickly demonstrate the financial viability of its client, it will make the lenders job easier.
This helps brokers get clients approved for loans and makes them easy to work with – improving their reputation, and subsequently deal flow, with lenders.
This is particularly important with clients that have a complicated profile. If a broker can easily and quickly show a lender that a business fits its criteria, it will improve the chances of doing a deal.
6. Offer Solutions to Current Clients
We understand the importance of repeat business for finance brokers and Red Flag Alert can be a very useful tool in proactively engaging with past or current customers.
You can set up Red Flag Alert to monitor businesses in a number of ways that can drive profitable new business.
For example, you may have helped a hotel chain obtain finance to develop a new site. Using Red Flag Alert you can monitor the hotel chain closely to look at growth in revenue and financial health, so when the business reaches a certain level of revenue that makes further fundraising possible you will see this immediately and can reach out to offer further fundraising solutions.
You can also monitor individuals. Red Flag Alert has details on 20 million key decision makers in British business. If a director you’ve worked with in the past takes up a directorship at a new business, you’ll be able to see this immediately and take the opportunity to discuss financing.
7. Manage Your Sales Data
B2B databases degrade at 30% a year. Using Red Flag Alert is the perfect solution to ensure that your data remains fresh.
Red Flag Alert updates its database with 50,000 changes every day. The Red Flag Alert API enables you to ensure these changes are reflected in your CRM. This has a few key benefits:
- It means you don’t need to be constantly worrying whether your sales team has updated the CRM manually.
- Data is consistent across the organisation. Because using the Red Flag Alert API updates your CRM automatically you can be sure that information available to sales will also be available to marketing and finance.
- Most importantly, the sales team has the most up-to-date information at their fingertips to drives sales activity.
8. Address Regulatory Challenges
The advent of GDPR has made data management difficult for all businesses; Red Flag Alert is the perfect tool for building GDPR compliant processes.
The foundation of GDPR is having a clear view on what data you hold. Many brokerages have data silos across their organisations and couldn’t demonstrate what data they owned if audited.
By plugging a CRM into Red Flag Alert’s dataset, a broker can show that the data is linked to a centralised master dataset that is updated regularly.
From this starting point, it is far easier to build and implement policies that are GDPR compliant. Red Flag Alert also helps brokers meet AML regulations.
Red Flag Alert Free Consultation
Don’t take our word for it – book a free one-hour consultation with one our data experts. The consultation will cover:
- How data can be used to give your brokerage a critical edge.
- Review of current data practices.
- Practical solutions for problems you face.
Use Red Flag Alert Platform for all your day-to-day needs from AML checks, credit risk and prospecting to the convenience of CRM integration. not sure? Why not request a free trial today ?
