360Lending, a prominent Canadian mortgage brokerage based in Ontario, recently opened its doors to our team at Real Estate Magazine for an in-depth exploration of its business model and operations. Through a series of insightful interviews conducted via email and Zoom, we’ve garnered a behind-the-scenes look at what makes 360Lending stand out in the competitive mortgage industry.

At the helm of 360Lending are Ringo So and Adam Mitchell, with Patricia Gomes serving as the principal broker. Its leadership is marked by a commitment to education, ensuring clients are well-informed throughout the mortgage process.

We delved into the company’s core principles to understand the foundation of its business ethos:

• Vision. Empower Canadians to navigate their financial journeys with confidence.
• Mission. Equip homeowners with the necessary education and tools to secure competitive mortgage options.
• Core values. Transparency, trust, compassion, friendliness and resourcefulness.

What do they offer?

The most common service 360Lending provides is debt consolidation. This has been a very successful program for the business mainly due to its track record of turning clients’ bad debt into good debt and monthly debt payments being reduced by up to 50 per cent.

The company also works with traditional mortgage lenders to provide first and second mortgages for purchases and refinancing. For clients who do not qualify with traditional lenders, usually due to bruised credit or reduced income, 360Lending also works with alternative and equity-based lenders to provide home equity loans, home equity lines of credit, second mortgages, private mortgages and construction loans.

Building a new process

Adam Mitchell felt that the client experience was subpar with how mortgage brokers traditionally operated. The old way consisted of providing quotes to clients early on in the process without obtaining crucial documents, like an appraisal, which often led to significant changes in the approval terms — and disappointed clients.

So, the team went back to the drawing board to ensure the new process properly manages client expectations, as well as to embed client education in every part of the sales process.

By collecting all of the required documentation at the start of the process, 360Lending can educate its clients on all of the options available, verify everything the lenders would need to know and then present clients with firm approvals with a minimal chance of surprises.

360Lending agents walk through clients’ personal situations and learn as much as they can about them. Then, they help them better understand their financial situation, and set their expectations on what is realistic. The team refers to this as the Know Your Client (KYC) process.

When they’ve passed the KYC process, the client moves to the underwriting team for a product suitability assessment. This is done to help determine the best lender and product given their current situation. The agent will get conditional approvals from the lender and walk through the terms with the client, along with a specific exit strategy for them. The exit strategy is an important part of the lending process.

Once a client is approved for the loan, they move to the client care team and get quarterly follow-ups. The goal here is to make sure the plan they put in place and the exit strategy are on track. If needed, 360Lending can place clients into “more competitive products as their lives evolve,” according to Ringo So.

The results

360Lending provided us with the amount funded through the company for the past four years. To be clear, this is not its revenue — this is the amount of money it has put out to clients:

• 2020 — $80 million
• 2021 — $102 million
• 2022 — $100 million
• 2023 — $90 million

On average, 360Lending has been able to help the majority of its clients save up to 50 per cent of their monthly interest payments. For example, clients who come with $50,000 in credit card debt are typically able to save around $9,000-$10,000 annually on their after-tax cash flow.

Accolades won by the team at 360Lending include:

• Outstanding Customer Service by an Individual Office
• First National Wizard Award
• Home Trust Platinum Partner
• Community Trust BariStar Achiever
• VERIS Awards — Chairman’s Club Award
• CMA Excellence Awardee

The result they’re most proud of?

360Lending has over 2,000 positive reviews online on Google, Trustpilot, Facebook, Yelp and others. The team was able to achieve a rating of 4.9 stars out of 5 across all platforms.

How do they keep their team accountable?

Every successful business has to track its numbers and focus on improving them to start scaling. We asked the leadership at 360Lending about what they track and to share those metrics with their team.

To start, here is what they track day-to-day with the sales team:

• Leads assigned
• Submissions
• Submissions-to-leads ratio
• Deals won
• Won-to-submissions ratio

They also track average time for funding. The company’s marketing states 5-8 days. This is the average once everything is in 360Lending’s hands. Sometimes, it can take clients longer to get all their documentation in order, but 360Lending tracks this metric once the timeline is under its control. If you add in the time it takes clients, the total average would fall in the 2-3 week range.

360Lending has invested in multiple systems to improve its team performance, including Trainual, a product specifically designed to better train employees and document the right processes.

Challenges in growing 360Lending

Every business runs into challenges along the way outside its control. For example, in 2017, the B-20 Stress Test required borrowers to qualify at 200 basis points higher than the contract rate. This requirement pushed people who would normally bank with A lenders to B lenders, and people normally banking with B lenders down to C lenders.

Especially for borrowers moving from A lenders to B lenders, it was a big change now that there were often extra fees they weren’t used to paying. Many B lenders charge one per cent of the loan value as a closing cost.

With prime rates increasing from 2.45 per cent to 7.20 per cent, it only accelerated that trend of people having to move down to the next lender tier.

The team had to quickly ramp up the educational component of their marketing. As more people began to use B and C lenders who never did before, they needed to learn about the differences.

Like everyone else, 360Lending had to adapt quickly when the COVID pandemic happened. The team scrambled to migrate everything to paperless within two weeks while still being compliant and ensuring client data was secure. The company eventually even hired a cybersecurity expert to audit what was there to make sure its clients’ data was safe.

Every time the team runs into a challenge, they do the same thing: evaluate their growth plan and metrics, invest in areas that are working best and test constantly. As Ringo So said during one of our interviews, “Testing is everything.”

Looking ahead

As the team plans for the future, they see some shifts coming besides the continued efforts to regulate the industry more and more. The most significant changes they expect are around the digitization of the mortgage industry, especially when it comes to using AI to adjudicate. While AI won’t necessarily impact brokers, lenders who have a lot of data will be using it at scale to adjudicate. They’ll use it to consider applicant data, credit score, payment history, etc., and match it to their past data to decide what to approve or not.

The company expects mortgage lenders to be more creative with their product offerings as consumers become more sophisticated and their needs continue to evolve.

There’s also a growing segment of consumers in the B space (subprime) due to the growing disparity between prices and income.

Where can they do better?

In our Zoom meeting with the 360Lending team, we spoke at length and agreed that the company’s biggest weakness is its lack of focus on social media marketing.

It’s fairly clear why. Despite the educational approach the team takes with clients, they feel that mortgages are a complex subject to tackle on social media.

While they’re actively working on content and a new and improved social media strategy, the team is also investing a significant amount into a new website that better aligns with 360Lending’s mission. They’re hoping to have that online soon.

360Lending’s approach is marked by a steadfast commitment to client education, innovative service delivery and continuous improvement. With strong leadership and a clear vision for the future, the company is poised to further solidify its position as an industry leader.