One advantage of online shopping is the freedom it provides to browse and learn about products without the fear of being accosted by salespeople. But when it comes to shopping for loans online, many people’s experiences have been far from pressure-free ― at least until Ask a Lender was released in November 2017.
Most digital platforms that promise loan comparisons don’t provide enough information about their lenders, loans or rates for consumers to make an informed decision. In addition, people have been burned with seemingly endless sales calls and promotional emails once they have been on one of these platforms.
Ask a Lender is turning that capture-and-sell model on its head. The Seattle-area-based tech startup is reinventing how people shop for loans and connect with lenders ― under its call for people to Borrow Wisely.
At Ask a Lender, www.askalender.com, people can connect directly with lenders for their various loan needs, including home mortgages, business loans and commercial real estate loans. They also can narrow down their searches to find lenders that specialize in mortgage preapprovals, home refinances, home equity loans, construction, reverse mortgages, etc.
Ask a Lender is powered by lender-matching technology that tracks as many as 6,000 distinct data points to match queries from potential borrowers with the lenders or brokers who offer the exact loans they are looking for.
Best of all, there is no sales pressure or privacy concerns. Unlike other platforms, Ask a Lender never sells a consumer’s personal data. Ask a Lender searches are completely anonymous, giving users the freedom to browse, compare and decide at their own speed without worrying about their personal information being sold off, receiving hard-sale phone calls at dinner time or having their email inboxes flooded with unwanted offers.
“We want to put consumers in the driver’s seat when it comes to making decisions about their financing,” says Brian Britton-Simmons, CEO and co-founder of Ask a Lender. “We give consumers information and control so they can buy the home of their dreams or start the small business they’ve always wanted.”
Base of Information
To help educate consumers about the ins and outs of borrowing, Ask a Lender offers an extensive library of knowledge articles to browse either before beginning their search for a loan or lender or when questions pop up in the process. As of February 2018, Ask a Lender has more than 500 in-depth articles on everything from buying your first home to understanding the implications of the tax changes on your mortgage interest deductions.
Interested in connecting with lenders who fund startups? Ask a Lender has articles about that. Want to know how you can improve your credit rating and what impact that will have on the interest rate you can get on a loan? Ask a Lender provides that information as well.
“Lending can be a complex business that produces reams of legal documents before loan closing,” says Kevin Britton-Simmons, chief operating officer and co-founder of Ask a Lender. “Even with cutting-edge technology driving comparisons across thousands of data points, consumers can’t make informed decisions unless we take the time to educate them.”
Lifetime of Experience
The power of Ask a Lender isn’t found only in its advanced lender-search capabilities, extensive library of knowledge articles, or its transparent and hands-off approach to lender-matching, however. The real power behind the Ask a Lender platform is the experience of the people who built it.
Ask a Lender is the brainchild of Brian and his two brothers, Todd and Kevin, who all have spent the better part of the last 30 years working in the family business — Scotsman Guide Media — publisher of the award-winning Scotsman Guide magazines. Scotsman Guide Media’s print and digital tools and publications have been the premier source of information for residential and commercial mortgage brokers and originators nationwide.
The brothers have taken the expertise and contacts cultivated through decades of building a thriving business-to-business media vehicle for professionals in the mortgage industry and applied it to the Ask a Lender consumer platform. Ask a Lender already has more than 3,000 active lending professionals who have posted some 25,000 loan programs on the platform in just a few months — a testament to the power of the platform and the strength of the team the family business attracted, all without utilizing any venture capital funding.
“We know the principals behind most of the big players in the mortgage industry because we have worked with them for most of our professional lives,” says Todd Britton-Simmons, sales director and co-founder of Ask a Lender, who has led business development at Scotsman Guide since 2001.
“Lenders and brokers are sold on the concept of Ask a Lender. Now we need to show consumers just how powerful this platform is for them.”
Visit www.askalender.com, and enjoy the power of searching, comparing and contacting lenders with no strings attached. And don’t forget to Borrow Wisely!