Macquarie planners get online rate fixing feature
Macquarie Investment Lending has added a new functionality to its adviser website, Gear Up, enabling planners to fix clients’ interest rates online via the secure website.
The launch of the upgrade is timed to coincide with the end of financial year and is expected to significantly reduce paperwork and processing times for advisers during one of their busiest periods.
It enables instant online approval and for rates to be fixed right up until 5pm on June 30, 2007.
The upgrade also provides a number of reporting features allowing advisers to track how many clients have fixed rates, the duration of the fixed rate and those who still need to make the change.
Peter van der Westhuyzen, Macquarie Investment Lending’s head of sales and marketing, said that research it conducted last year indicated 48 per cent of advisers prefer to perform client administrative requests online rather than via hard copy.
“Advisers are always telling us that they need more time and less paperwork, and introducing this innovative online function at the busiest time of the year is our way of reducing the burden for financial advisers.
“We could have waited to launch this innovation after the rush was over . . . but the overwhelming feedback was that advisers want this functionality online, and we saw it as an opportunity to make everybody’s life easier in the pressure-cooker that is June,” van der Westhuyzen said.
A pilot version of the upgrade was trialled later in last year’s financial year-end rush, which limited the interest-rate fixing functionality to clients themselves.
In response to overwhelming adviser demand, Macquarie Investment Lending tweaked the system to allow it to make changes on clients’ behalf, spending around three months implementing the latest upgrade.
During the previous round of Gear Up enhancements in March this year, Macquarie began distributing transaction authority forms for clients to complete, allowing advisers to perform a range of transactions on clients’ behalf on an ongoing basis.
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