The UK's first mortgage broker has deployed technology to certify ‘all’ its leads marking the finance industry's latest effort to clean up the lead generation sector.
Your Mortgage Decisions, a Peterborough-based mortgage broker, has appointed lead certification specialist Contact State to legitimise all its mortgage leads before they are sent out to lenders and advisers.
This means the broker will know what advertising techniques were used and which landing pages the prospective clients came through to enter their details.
Contact State's application programme interface (API) attaches a 'Data Certificate' to each certified lead it funnels through.
The way leads are generated has been a big topic of debate for the protection industry over the last year, with many questioning whether life insurance advertising paints a full picture.
“Through the Contact State API, we are not only improving the quality of lead generation for our mortgage business - as well as our equity release and protection services - but we’re also able to see for ourselves that that our lead generation partners take compliance seriously," said Martin Wade, director of Your Mortgage Decisions.
“This not only ensures we are meeting all our advertising and data regulatory requirements but also creates a much better and more profitable customer marketing journey, with better results all-round.”
Earlier this month, Tom Baigrie, LifeSearch’s chairperson told a room full of insurers they must hold their third-party agents and brokers to account for the sake of the protection industry’s collective reputation.
In a report published alongside Baigrie's speech, mystery shoppers had found they were “inundated” with follow-up calls and voicemails from salespeople trying to keep a lead alive after a consumer had entered their details via a free quote tool.
In some cases, it said mystery shoppers received multiple call backs each hour, with one receiving 20 calls in the space of a single day. And even when an agent was told to stop calling, in some cases they did not.
"Pressure tactics” were also cited, as well as instances where more expensive policies were recommended regardless of whether they were necessary, and where factually incorrect statements were made by agents to keep a customer on side.
Thomas Brett, head of mortgage and lending at Contact State, said: “Within the financial services industry, there are still far too many instances of consumers receiving sales calls from firms and thinking ‘how did they get my number?’.
“At Contact State, we want to change that, and that’s why we are helping firms guarantee the validity of leads by ensuring they know everything about each customers’ unique marketing journey.
“This helps lead buyers build trust, achieve transparency, protect their business and improve return on investment from their lead generation campaigns.”
Earlier this month, Contact State also signed up its first protection broker, Enduralife.
ruby.hinchliffe@ft.com
