Pineapple elevates the mortgage industry with Salesforce

Taking out a mortgage is widely acknowledged to be complex, laborious, and occasionally stressful. But not with Pineapple Financial.

The company is transforming the mortgage industry in Canada, one step at a time. It’s taken previously manual and time-consuming mortgage application processes and replaced them with an innovative, automated, and digitalized approach. As a result, Pineapple has cut mortgage application times by 30% and grown its business from 100 to 700 brokers in just five years.

Founded in 2017, Pineapple Financial serves thousands of homebuyers across Canada through its network of brokers, helping them select the right products and making it easier to put in place the mortgage solutions they need. The firm has a strong focus on ethics, diversity, equality, and educating all those involved in the industry to create as seamless an experience as possible for homebuyers.

With ambitious growth plans, the Pineapple team realized from the start that there was a better way to deliver mortgage services. They set about establishing processes that were more efficient for brokers and more transparent for borrowers. To achieve its goals, the trailblazing financial services company has been using Salesforce since 2018 as part of its technology ecosystem.

Service Cloud, Salesforce Inbox, and Marketing Cloud now support Pineapple’s brokers, customers, and partners at every stage of the homebuying journey, including lead generation and nurturing, onboarding communications, day-to-day engagement, data processing, and analytics.

Mortgage applications have traditionally been slowed down by cumbersome manual processes, a lack of transparency, and sluggish communication. Not anymore – Pineapple has streamlined the process by 30% by automating elements with its integrated digital platform, which means a faster response for potential homebuyers and less work for brokers.

“We can achieve more in less time with digitalized workflows in Salesforce,” explains Shubha Dasgupta, Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder & Director at Pineapple. “With automation built in at every stage – from mortgage applications to underwriting and approvals processes - we’ve freed up time for our brokers so they can focus on the things that matter.”

With real estate agents, accountants, and lawyers all involved in the homebuying process, communications can often become convoluted, resulting in delays. “We’ve eliminated communication lags by building a secure portal where users can submit, manage, and view documentation and see approval status in real time,” explains Dasgupta.

Through seamless integration with Pineapple’s knowledge base, homebuyers can view helpful and informative content via the portal. With all related emails and documents logged in a single place, customers can be serviced more effectively by their brokers, plus the centralized platform provides a complete audit trail for regulators.

Tailored, timely communications are vital to keep potential and existing customers engaged, but with a basic email delivery solution, sending out communications involved lots of manual intervention for Pineapple. With an integrated marketing solution, Pineapple can now send fully automated personalized communications to its three different audiences – mortgage borrowers, partners, and its internal team of brokers.

Using segmentation to divide its customers according to their interests and borrowing stage, Pineapple sends relevant emails on behalf of its brokers. These might start with educational campaigns to nurture leads, and continue with tailored content to drive engagement, boost retention, and keep Pineapple top of mind. “We’re continuously adjusting our marketing campaigns based on the feedback we capture,” comments Dasgupta. “We also use the marketing platform to share news, information, surveys, and forms with our network of brokers and partners.”

The company is currently expanding its marketing communications capabilities by developing 24 new customer journeys that will further boost the customer experience.

With more time on their hands, Pineapple’s brokers can focus their energy on building better relationships with existing customers and securing new ones.

Using integrated communications and data analysis capabilities, Pineapple can generate new leads for its brokers. For example, brokers are automatically notified when customer mortgage renewals are about to come up, if they wish to remortgage, or when they respond positively to a communication offering a new service. “At a time when home buying has slowed, it’s important that our brokers can maintain relationships and talk more to existing customers to ensure they’re meeting their current and future needs,” comments Dasgupta. “We have lowered the cost of customer acquisition, but we’ve also enhanced satisfaction to maximize customer lifetime value and revenues for our brokers.”

With its ground-breaking approach, it’s not surprising that Pineapple is growing. It already has multiple broker and affiliate partner offices across Canada and has plans to expand operations into new geographies over the next few years. The firm is also breaking into new strategic areas such as commercial mortgages and insurance.

“Our digital platform means we can innovate at a faster pace and have the flexibility and scalability to take the business where we want to go,” says Dasgupta. “The sky’s the limit with Salesforce – it’s a blank canvas where you can paint a picture as big as your imagination.”