An Interview with Mariya Petkova
Mariya Petkova is the owner and manager of Creditchoice Ltd. – an independent credit intermediary, with more than 16 years of experience in the sales of banking products and services. She is also the Deputy Chairman of the Association of Credit Intermediaries in Bulgaria. Today, Mariya will share why it is beneficial to use a **Credit Intermediary** and will tell us a success story from her own experience.
Why should you use a Credit Intermediary?
If you are a busy working person with a fast-paced daily life, you certainly value your time. In this case, the services of a Credit Intermediary are a necessity when taking out a loan. Why? Because it will save you time, effort, and financial costs.
Before taking out a loan, a person usually wants to have between 3 and 5 different bank offers. Based on my experience so far, I can confirm that gathering offers, which includes visiting banks, talking to representatives, and researching, takes about 2–3 days. And let’s not forget that this is only the first stage of the entire process. Choosing a loan is a difficult decision; to make the most advantageous one, you need a certain knowledge base. We, at Creditchoice, have the necessary knowledge and extensive experience, and we will provide you with the opportunity to choose the best bank financing offer quickly and easily.
As Credit Intermediaries, we will save you effort. We can compare 5 bank offers and choose the most beneficial one for you within an hour. For a person without experience in the banking sector, this would take days, as every lending offer contains not only interest rate information but also many other fees, general terms, and commissions. What will we do? We will put all this information in a table, easily understandable for the client. This way, you will be able to see the absolute total cost of the loan.
Besides time and effort, a **Credit Consultant** will also save you money. How? Every bank employee you talk to at a specific bank will give you an offer. Yes, but this offer will not always be the most advantageous for you. In the credit industry, there are no precisely prepared standard offers, and interest rates are very often negotiated on an individual level. We at Creditchoice are exceptionally strong in this area. Thanks to our long-standing experience, we know very well what information to gather from the client and how to present it to the bank to negotiate the most favourable interest rates. Additionally, every bank knows that we, as Credit Consultants, will gather offers from at least four other competitors. This predisposes them to offer the best possible deal.
We at Creditchoice can also save money for people who have already taken out a loan by checking whether the terms are the most favourable as of today.
Why should you use our services and not those of the competition?
Creditchoice employees have long-standing experience, which allows us to be flexible when structuring a given loan, enabling us to “read between the lines” and offer good solutions even for the most difficult lending cases. Creditchoice is the intermediary with the highest number of signed contracts with various banks, which gives us great opportunities to choose between different offers.
I don’t like to say that our service is free because the client receives immense added value. However, the client does not owe any money to the Credit Consultant, as we receive our remuneration from the banks.
A brief success story from Mariya’s experience
In 2018, the second year since the founding of Creditchoice, a client came to me who had already put down a deposit on a property without discussing it with a bank or a notary. Together, we chose a bank offer. The necessary two weeks for loan approval passed, but the bank issued a statement that the property was problematic, ownership was not proven, and for them, this was not acceptable collateral. Consequently, they refused the loan, and the client had about 10 days to secure the funds before the preliminary contract expired and they lost the deposit. Since the statement was legal, I personally consulted the documentation with a notary, who confirmed that the chance of the property having unproven ownership was minimal and the issue was baseless. To finalise the loan as quickly as possible, I changed the bank, took care of the documentation, and my client received the amount she needed. I believe that without a Credit Intermediary, the client would not have been able to handle the documentation and the quick actions required.
