Comparing Traditional Payment Methods vs. Embedded Payments in CRM Systems

The mortgage industry has never been more complex and competitive, with pressure from budget online brokers, turbulent house prices, and standing out in a crowded market.

However, one thing is simple – if you are getting paid then you have succeeded. The fact that they are the deciding factor between success and failure means that payments should be as frictionless as possible, and yet there are many ways that the digital payments systems many brokers use fall short. This is particularly evident when they interact with customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Traditional payment methods are a poor fit for both CRMs and the mortgage brokers who rely on them, but there is a new generation of embedded payments that simplify the taking of payments and integrate seamlessly with CRM systems.

How brokers used to take payments

For a long time, paying a mortgage broker was a strictly face-to-face affair – handing them a cheque, perhaps even cash or, for a forward-thinking broker, a credit card imprinter. Getting paid meant chasing customers by phone then waiting for a cheque to arrive in the post. Further chasing risked annoying customers and breaking the relationship that the broker has built up, perhaps over years, and thereby preventing repeat business or recommendations.

More recently, it has been possible to take payments digitally. The ‘click-clack’ card imprinter has been replaced by SIM-enabled card readers and even smartphones that can take payments, but using them will mean being physically present with a client. For ‘card not present’ payments, brokers could take card numbers over the phone and enter them into their own payment systems.

One of the key problems with all of this, from cheques to digital payments, is that it can only be integrated with CRMs by hand. Every payment has to be entered into the CRM manually so that the broker and their company knows that a payment has been taken and the customer interaction is closed. If this isn’t done correctly then there can be serious problems, such as asking clients who have already paid to pay again or not being able to reconcile payments in your company’s account. This can largely be ameliorated by scrupulous record-keeping, but that will only go so far – everyone makes mistakes and sooner or later if you rely on manually entering payments a mistake will be made. So, is there a better way?

Embedded Payments

Checkout pages have been a common feature of online commerce for decades. They are essentially digital versions of the forms you might find in catalogues that allow you to enter your card details and mail it to receive an item or start a subscription. In the early days of eCommerce, deploying one of these pages was difficult, as they had to be coded by hand. This changed in 1994 when the company NetMarket began to sell the first off-the-shelf checkouts, which have since been joined by systems like Shopify, so today adding payment functionality is extremely easy. Recently, payments have been made even easier thanks to the introduction of embedded payments.

While checkouts need to be in a single place (‘www.yourwebsite.com/checkout’), embedded payments can, as their name suggests, be embedded anywhere. That has huge advantages for brokers. For example, if a client likes to communicate by text or WhatsApp, a payment link could be sent to their phone during a conversation. If they are one of the nearly two-thirds of homebuyers who have help from their parents, then they (the client) can forward the payment link to their parents.

Apart from speed, there is also the matter of security – even though the payments system can be sent anywhere and everywhere it remains a purely one-way transaction, so your own system and the payment details of your clients will be secure. Tokenisation, in which payment details are encrypted as a reusable ‘token’ are a major part of this, particularly when clients pay through digital wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Using Embedded Payments with CRMs

More likely than not, your company’s CRM is the heart of your operations, the central point that everything flows through. Used correctly, it can organise every part of your business life, from the meetings you will have each day to the marketing emails you’ll send out. Payments need to be part of this, and that is especially true of embedded payments.

As they are technically out of your hands, embedded payments can be hard to track – you would have to check your account to make sure that the payment has happened, and that might not always be possible. At most, you would have to check a separate system from your CRM and update it manually, which introduces the possibility of mistakes.

Embedded payments that integrate fully with CRMs ultimately increase customer satisfaction by handling the difficult work of getting paid at your end. When your payments are taken care of by integrating embedded payments into your CRM you can take more time to work on the relationships that drive your business.