We’ve enhanced the Portal: it’s now faster, easier and simpler

Over the last few months, we’ve been working towards becoming faster, further improving our service levels and making general changes to benefit you and your customers. We’ve transformed our underwriting process, reduced our pricing and put a huge focus on enhancing the Portal.

The Portal is your one-stop shop for all things business lending at Atom — whether you’re generating quotes, submitting a full application or sharing required and supporting documentation with us. So, it’s really important to us that the Portal is the best it can be and we’re continuously looking at ways to improve it.

We’ve implemented 171 enhancements to our business lending journey so far this year (including to the Portal). Many of the updates were based on feedback from brokers, or made with the aim of streamlining the application process to make the journey easier for you and your customers.

Don’t worry, we’re not about to present you with a list of all 171 changes. Instead, here’s an overview of some of the Portal improvements we think are going to make the biggest difference to you.

Quick Quote enhancements

When using our Quick Quote tool to generate a quote, you’ll notice a new ‘Supporting Documents’ section on the quote output. This will show you the information and documentation your customer will need to prepare if they wish to proceed with a full application. The information shown is tailored to the product type and sector, so you’re not working through a generic list of documentation that isn’t going to be used.

This means that, before you even begin the application, you get a step ahead and work with your customer to gather all the relevant information.

Within the Quick Quote tool, we’ve also simplified the options in the “security type” drop down, making it easier to use.

Dynamic document checklist

Currently, we have the ‘BBSL & RLS Application Checklist’ available on our website’s documents page for you to download as a PDF and use to gather the required documents needed.

To remove the need for gathering excess documents, which will save you time, we’ve brought this checklist into the Portal. Depending on your application type, we’ll flag the required documents that are needed as part of the submission. You’ll need to tick to confirm you’ve uploaded what we need, and then you can submit the application. This means we can start processing your application as soon as we pick it up, without having to pause to ask you for any key documentation.

Please note: we may still need to ask for other supporting information throughout the application process to aid in our assessment of the application.

Enhancements to the Income, Assets & Expenditure data capture

Most lenders (ourselves included!) will ask your customer to provide a view of the ‘Assets, Liabilities, Income and Expenditure’ (ALIE) for all of the key individuals within the business. We previously asked your customer to provide this as a separate document to ensure we had all the details we needed.

We enhanced the ‘Income, Assets & Expenditure’ section of the Portal to make sure we no longer have to ask your customer for an ALIE. These changes include breaking down income types and also asking for extra detail around expenditure. So, if your customer pays £500 a month on an Atom residential mortgage of £500,000, you can give us this information in the Portal - so no more tedious excel sheet ALIE to fill in separately.

Security details

Similar to the above, where you are submitting a property investment application, we would ask you to provide a tenancy schedule. We have built out the security details section of the Portal to ensure we get all of the details we need as part of your Portal application. This means you no longer have to submit a separate tenancy schedule as part of your submission.

Broker password reset frequency

Brokers have told us that needing to do a password reset every month was too frequent and made the journey to logging in more cumbersome. After careful assessment with our security team, we’ve improved this process meaning you only need to reset your password in the Portal once every 3 months.

Big fixes

We’ve fixed a number of bugs within the system, giving you a smoother experience when submitting applications to us.

What’s next?

This is just the beginning of a longer-term program of enhancements to Portal. You can expect a number of improvements and exciting updates over the coming months. Keep an eye on our website and LinkedIn page for updates.

Help shape the next generation of Portal

We’d love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have for the Portal. If there are any new features you’d like to see or any gripes you’d like us to fix, please let us know here and we’ll do our best to factor your feedback into our roadmap of updates.