The Energy-efficient Benefits of a Remote Brokerage Model

As inflation starts to bite at the bottom line, “going green” might feel like an unnecessary luxury; especially for a brokerage that’s feeling the pinch of rising interest rates. Though it might seem like too much effort or more trouble than it’s worth, pivoting into a remote brokerage – or using elements of it – can enhance your bottom line.

Ditching the office altogether not only saves in corporate lease overheads, it also eliminates company energy usage. It also reduces your company’s carbon footprint as employees no longer have to commute to work.

By using aggregation (more on that later) it also reduces your reliance on IT infrastructure that also has to be managed by external services – who also have their own bulky, energy inefficient IT infrastructure to maintain!

If you are starting your loan brokerage or are looking to pivot into a green or remote brokerage model, here are some of the real ways you can benefit from it.

Considering Remote Work

Work From Home – possibly the catchcry of the pandemic – is becoming a permanent fixture in business. 97.6% of employees want to continue working off site (at least in some capacity) for the remainder of their careers. It not only benefits employees and the bottom line of the business, it also helps the environment.

No more carbon emissions from commuting, paying for lights and energy-hungry computers or servers, printing costs, heating costs, and more. Ditching the office entirely not only means cost savings but environmental savings.

Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

If your brokerage simply can’t work from home 100% of the time, there are ways to go green and save on costs in the process. This may take the form of installing LED lights, for example. A single bulb can shine for as long as 50,000 hours – which is a far cry from Halogen bulbs’ 2,000 hours. LEDs can shine with or more brightness using a tenth of the power of halogen or incandescent bulb, too.

There are many other ways to reduce your brokerage’s carbon footprint: you could be using cloud computing packages instead of using your own IT servers; installing solar panels; or installing skylights to harness the sun’s light instead of keeping lights on altogether. All these efficiencies can reduce power bills and add to your bottom line.

Using Lender Aggregation

It might take a lot of time and money to invest in your own IT infrastructure and support services. However, by considering credit aggregation services, you may reduce the cost of expensive servers and other IT services.

Aggregation is the new strategy for achieving broker company development without putting in many hours of compliance work or navigating complicated regulatory and volume requirements. Without needing to invest more in IT or physical sites, aggregation provides you access to several lenders—much like your own lending panel—for consumer and business asset or short-term financing.

This offers you immediate access to a lending panel that is already in place and is made up of banks, non-conforming lenders, and even insurance companies, enabling you to give your consumers the same amount of choice as “big box” banks or the Big 4.

In order to serve your best interests, aggregation services frequently provide professional development and compliance training. Using remote or cloud computing, it may also set up document acceptance that is consumer credit compliance-ready and establish ready connections to credit reporting agencies to pre-screen applicants for loans. This can drastically reduce your carbon footprint and costs as a result.

Using Communication Technology

A simplified and economical solution to save phone calls and administrative costs is to use an integrated communications platform to reduce reliance on physical meetings.

Your cloud computing apps can also communicate via integrated communications which means further reduction in costs and in your carbon footprint.

You can keep employee options open and on the same page with integrated communication that can link-in with your project management tools, CRM, and other communication methods—video chat, text chat, or phone conversations.

Integrated communications may also connect to VoIP and route calls to staff members using a range of devices and working from anywhere in the world, which can improve corporate efficiency and reliance on physical infrastructure, which cuts costs and your carbon footprint.

Go Paperless

Investing in tablets or laptops means their portability can replace the need for costly printers or photocopiers – and their hard-to-dispose of toner or ink cartridges. Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids per millilitre – even more than Chanel No. 5 perfume or Dom Perignon!

Reducing paper usage – or keeping it to a minimum and using recycled paper – is one great way to reduce your carbon footprint and save on stationery costs. Speaking of stationery – you can also get green stationery to help the environment even further!

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About Rinkesh

A true environmentalist by heart ❤️. Founded Conserve Energy Future with the sole motto of providing helpful information related to our rapidly depleting environment. Unless you strongly believe in Elon Musk‘s idea of making Mars as another habitable planet, do remember that there really is no 'Planet B' in this whole universe.