ComparetheMarket recently launched a range of online execution-only remortgages with two of the largest lenders in the UK. I’m sure this headline will have grabbed the attention of anyone that leads a mortgage firm and intends to grow their business over coming years and quite rightly so.

In fact, if you log on to any well-known price comparison website, you’ll find that it’s not just insurance products that are part of their overall game plan. Next to the usual compare home insurance or travel insurance buttons, you’ll see options for protection, conveyancing and now also unsurprisingly, a pathway to self-serve a remortgage.

Last year, around 600,0000 people who had been advised on a mortgage by a firm like you, found their home insurance elsewhere. Furthermore, these sites have also collected upwards of 60 personal and property data fields per quote, providing vast intelligence to market your clients with sophisticated, highly personalised communications to deepen that new founded relationship.

Today’s reality is that most people choose financial advisers to arrange a mortgage, but this does not rule out how much power online brands are gaining by building relationships with a footfall of your clients who seek wider product advice alongside their mortgage. From home insurance to conveyancing, these products are a likely need of your client throughout the homebuying process, if not a legal requirement of the mortgage. It therefore makes a lot of sense for advisory businesses to take these products more seriously to make sure they’re delivering against their client needs.

Mortgage advice certainly opens the door to the potential of building a successful business, but what is becoming more apparent to me is that the breadth of service across wider product areas, is the key to protecting and retaining a loyal and longstanding client base which is well-served. Frankly, I believe it’s a necessity to build sustainable and long-lasting client relationships in 2021 and beyond.

The irony is that innovation in home insurance and conveyancing technology for intermediaries has moved much faster than many direct-to-consumer services. I can’t stress enough that it’s not about spending more hours working, late nights filling in forms or rekeying data. The answer is to choose the right technology partner, who can tangibly evidence their capability to integrate and embed these services within your business.

So, if I asked you now to consider offering wider financial services and advice to your clients, would you?