Warranties a winner for ThinkSmart
Computer and office equipment finance company ThinkSmart is deviating slightly from its core business in winning a tender with The Warranty Group, to support the delivery of warranty products and services within the consumer electronics division of Woolworths.The tender covers 400 outlets in Australia and New Zealand, including Dick Smith electronics, a company with which ThinkSmart already harbours strong relationships."Our responsibility is the sales and marketing side in a three-way partnership with Woolworths, The Warranty Group and ourselves, and it's basically their (The Warranty Group's) risk criteria," said Neil Barker, group chief financial officer at ThinkSmart. "We are not taking any financial risk."There is an opportunity for us to broaden this revenue line by taking this to other retailers we deal with in the market, which could either be domestically or internationally."We are basically leveraging our existing infrastructure, so we have business development managers already on the ground who already service the Dick Smith and Tandy channel, so it's really just the incremental cost of putting more business development managers on the ground."We will focus on the Dick Smith stores initially, and then progressively roll out following the implementation plan agreed with Woolworths."There isn't a higher cost impact on the business to generate the additional revenues so the cost to income ratio for the new revenue stream will be quite low."