Knowing Your Referral Source
Many
brokers build their business through referral sources they have developed.
These sources vary and can include any type of business, some of the more
common examples are car yards, real estate agents, accountants, trades etc.
It’s important as a broker that you know
your referral sources.
A
large portion of complaints that we receive can be traced back to unscrupulous referral
partners. These incidents have the potential to cause damage to our collective
brands and often have a financial impact for you (the broker), your aggregator
and us (the lender).
Latitude Expectation
At Latitude we only want to fund loans from reputable sources. We expect that the applications you (the broker) submit from referral sources are from referrers you (the broker):
- Have conducted your due diligence on.
- Understand the products they sell and the type of businesses they run.
It is also important to remember, it’s your responsibility as a broker to interview the client, confirm and/or collect all application information from the client and ensure you are meeting all responsibilities under your credit licence or the credit licence holder that you are an authorised credit representative (ACR) of. These responsibilities should never be handled by the referral source.
Exclusion
If you have referrers that fall into the below categories, please refrain from sending these applications to us.
- Referral sources where you don’t know who they are and/or what they sell.
- Referral sources that have poor reputations and/or that sell high risk products.
- Referral sources that sell speculative products where a monetary return is promised as part of the product being sold – most common forms of these are businesses that promote/promise earnings from the on sale of their product to others; or earnings from signing up additional parties to that product. These can sometimes be disguised as training courses.