FR: Tell us a little bit about Forest Hall Financial Solutions and yourself?
Forest Hall was founded in 2020 by me and business partner John Wain. From being in the industry since 2012 working for various firms, we decided to set up ourselves, believing that we could offer a more rounded proposition to our clients. Since then we have expanded to 11 advisers and plan to expand further. We advise on everything from residential first-time buyers to large developments, as well as the insurances associated with these transactions.
FR: How important is technology to your business and for customers using your business?
Technology is extremely important and is at the heart of our business. We try to involve as much clever tech as possible to help day to day business run as smooth as possible, creating a more streamlined customer journey. We use technology in all areas of the business, right from the start of an enquiry up to completion and customer retention.
FR: What challenges has OMS helped you overcome and what are the most important areas that OMS have supported you with?
The real issue I’ve had with our process in the past was the time it takes to deal with individual steps of a mortgage application journey. On systems we have previously used, we would have to constantly leave the CRM / fact find system to do ID / AML checks, send emails, check EPC certificates, conduct AVMs, perform credit checks etc, sourcing, sending documents that require signing etc.
With OMS, it really is a One Mortgage System. The majority of our tasks can be done within the system without having to rekey information into different systems. One thing we have found extremely useful is the ability to customise our fact find to fit our advice process. The system allows us to create a fact find that suits our business, and allows us to generate the correct documents directly from it, such as custom suitability letters for specific application types, disclaimers, invoices, advice addendum letters, pre and post advice confirmation letters etc. Everything can be personalised, allowing us to link anything from a fact find into a document. The customisability of the system is what really drew me to OMS. We can also build completely custom reports for literally anything. Many systems only have standard reporting suites which cannot be customised. However with OMS we can have literally anything built. If the data is in the system, we can report on it.
FR: How does OMS help you retain mortgage customers?
There are a number of ways OMS helps retain mortgage customers. There are built in automated communication methods we can use to automatically send customers personalised information about their existing deals, their end dates and what the process is. We can also build custom reports for management to assess what our future pipeline looks like and what deals are coming up.
FR: Looking forward to the rest of 2025 and beyond, how else do you think technology can help brokers and their customers?
I feel that brokers need to embrace technology moving forward. I don’t think that technology such as AI will ever fully replace an adviser, but as advisers we should definitely embrace it. These tools are there to aide us in improving the outcome for the client which is always the main goal. This can be something as simple as better ways of storing client documents more securely, all the way up to a fully automated client journey. This will allow us all to spend more time on giving quality advice to our clients, instead of wasting hours on manual tasks that can be performed better using technology.
