Quest for the perfect advice
Into the deep end
Hypotheek Visie has grown into one of the Netherlands’ larger financial services providers. With the pay-off “Because a home is where you do your living" and a client-oriented business philosophy strongly focused on "living experience," founder Anton Vanden Bol has in essence redefined the mortgage sector. His goal is to give the consumer as much control as possible over one of the most drastic and at the same time most abstract decisions of his or her life – taking out a mortgage.Halfway through our conversation, Anton Vanden Bol, who sold his organization in 2017, suddenly says: “You’re nodding ‘yes, I get what you mean,’ but the question is whether I can just assume that you really do know what I mean." In one sentence, this sums up exactly the reason why Vanden Bol started Hypotheek Visie in the early nineties. “What I saw was that a consumer would take the same question to ten different providers and be presented ten different products, all claiming to be the optimal product. Now, of course that can’t possibly be true. Because if you really listen to the consumer, then there can be only one best product for that person’s specific situation.”
n other words, a lot of people make one of the most far-reaching decisions of their lives based on the words of the advisor they managed to find. And with all the consequences you can imagine, because there's a shocking number of mortgage constructions out there on the market with long-term consequences that non-professionals can scarcely imagine. And that’s why Vanden Bol decided the time had come for Hypotheek Visie. Independent, client-friendly, and above all, with a crystal-clear philosophy: A house is not a goal in itself; it’s a means to lifestyle and living. “If that’s your starting point,” says Vanden Bol, “then you suddenly start asking very different questions. How do people want to set up their lives? What moves them? How well do they know themselves? To get a good idea of all this, you have to jump into the deep end. And only when you have that good idea can you give them solid advice.”
Solid advice – that's what it’s about for Vanden Bol, and that's actually one of the most complex parts of the job, he says. “I could very easily let mortgage advice degenerate into something like simply offering the lowest price. That’s something that everyone gets: 300 euros is less than 400 euros. But the difference between 30 years of certainty at 800 euros per month or 30 years of risk at 200 euros now, but maybe 1,200 euros a month in five years, well, that's a whole different story. That’s when you have to ask yourself: Does the client actually understand what they're choosing, and how do I keep them from having the feeling that they made the wrong decision somewhere down the line?
Psychological decision-making
In their quest for the perfect advice, Vanden Bol and his employees gradually became more and more interested in the mental processes of decision-making. Hypotheek Visie even had a new computer program developed, driven by brain impulses. “We made the news all over with that, as if some kind of lie detector was now going to determine what kind of mortgage you had to take,” laughs Vanden Bol. "But for us, it was a serious attempt to fathom what goes on in the client's head at the moment they have to make certain choices." Although the experiment ultimately did not produce a workable model, it taught Vanden Bol that it was not only Hypotheek Visie looking for insight into the customer's deeper motivations. By chance, house consultant Altuïtion put Vanden Bol on the trail of scientific research in that area. A few weeks later, he was on a plane with Altuïtion’s board of directors heading towards Harvard University in the US. “A professor there, Prof. Gerald Zaltman, had developed a whole new method for mapping decision-making models in the subconscious, the ZMET® method. We had two days of very pleasant meetings there, and to cut a long story short: Altuïtion licensed ZMET®, and Hypotheek Visie was to serve as the pilot project,” concludes Vanden Bol.
Results of the ZMET® study
The results of the study confirmed that Hypotheek Visie was founded on the right philosophy. “Consumers are afraid of getting financially tied down, much more than they usually want to admit to themselves. The choice of the right mortgage is seen as a labyrinth that they can’t get out of on their own, even if they sometimes think they can,” says Vanden Bol. “So that’s something that we can get a lot of mileage out of in our message: With a Hypotheek Visie mortgage, you can just go on living as you are now. No worries, no catches – just solid, safe, and dependable.”Another not less interesting result of the ZMET® survey was that consumers see a mortgage as an entirely generic product – and this prejudice affects other financial products in addition to mortgages. "What it showed us is that we have to put a skin on the raw product, something that the client recognizes and that they have warm associations with," says Vanden Bol. "This is something that was already in the genes of Hypotheek Visie, but that we will be building on even further.”
