Your book,
your vault.

§0 · What HUB gives you

One place for the whole client relationship

HUB replaces the scattered email thread. Your clients, the contacts you have claimed, your application forms, your live transactions and your documents all sit in one private portal — on your desktop and in your pocket.

Three things in it change how a working day goes. You can hand the application form to the borrower instead of typing it for them. You can register a contact so that the relationship cannot be taken from you. And you have real storage, with links you can send and then switch off.

The rest — clients, agenda, transactions, requests, the reference library — is there so you do not have to keep any of it in your inbox.

On a phone the navigation becomes a bottom bar with a “+” in the middle for the three things you do most often: a new client, a new application, or scanning a document with the camera.

§1 · The Application Form

Let the borrower do the typing

The AOL Application Form is ten steps long and asks for two banks, three passports and a full set of company details. You no longer have to collect all of that by email and type it in yourself.

Sending the link takes one field. You type the borrower's email address and nothing else — you do not have to create a form first, or open a draft, or prepare anything. AOL emails a link that works without a password and without an account. If you would rather send it yourself, copy the link and put it in your own message.

It also works the other way round: start the form, get as far as you can with what you know, and then send that draft to the borrower to finish. The same button sends it to a different address if the first one was wrong.

Two details do more work than they look like. The link code leaves out every character that can be misread — no capital O, no zero, no capital I, no lowercase L, no one — so you can read it down the phone to someone. And everything the borrower types saves as they go, so they can close the page, find their bank details, and come back tomorrow to a form that is still half full.

The passport copies they upload are placed inside the finished Word document automatically. Only the borrower's company name is ever required, which means a partly finished form is always saved rather than rejected.

The ten steps, and who fills them

Steps one and two are usually yours: the instrument and how it is delivered. Type an ISIN and the currency, the leasing fee and the issuing bank complete themselves — and the borrower gets that same autocomplete. Steps three to nine are the borrower's territory, and two of them only appear when the account holder is someone other than the borrower. The last step is the fees agreement, including your commission inside the leasing fee.

When the borrower downloads the finished document, you get a notification: the company name, and the fact that they have taken it away to sign. The form itself arrives in AOL's system. It does not create a client record or a transaction — those stay yours to make.

§2 · Protecting your contacts

Register the name, keep the relationship

The No Pass Over Archive is where you write down the people and companies you are working on. If one of them contacts AOL directly, AOL sends them back to you.

That promise only means something if the claim is real, so the check runs across the whole company. When you register a contact, HUB looks for it in every broker's archive — first by email address, then by name and company together.

If the contact is free, it is yours. If somebody got there first, your request is refused with one deliberately vague line — “This contact already exists — please contact us.” You are not told who holds it. That cuts both ways, and it is the point: when the contact is yours, no other broker learns that you are working on it either.

The eight stages

The archive is a board you can drag cards across, or a plain list if you prefer. Each column counts what is in it, and each card has a status dropdown that updates immediately. A contact you add from the board starts at First approach; from there it moves towards Partner, the protected outcome, or to Lost. Anything can be parked in Frozen without giving up the claim, and thawed back later.

You can also claim a contact without leaving the client you are working in: every client has a Protection tab with a single button that files them in the archive. Every change of stage is recorded, and it comes back to you in the recent-activity list on your dashboard.

§3 · Disk

Ten gigabytes, and links you can switch off

Disk is your own encrypted storage inside the portal: 10 GB per broker, up to 500 MB in a single file, and more if you ask. It is where the documents you exchange with clients live instead of in an email thread.

The useful part is not the space. It is that a file has a life: you capture it, you file it, you replace it with a better version, you send it to somebody for a fortnight, you find out when they opened it, and you can cut the link the moment you change your mind.

Uploading takes several files at once and stops on a rename step before saving, so nothing ends up filed as IMG_4021. If you are not at your desk, the camera does it: photograph the document, crop and straighten it against an A4, Letter, square or wide frame, and it is filed as an image.

Folders carry a colour, nest as deep as you need, and can be tied to a client — open that folder and the client's own media is listed there too, read-only. Files your clients upload arrive marked client and download-only, so you cannot overwrite what they sent you. Deleted things wait in the bin until you empty it, videos play without downloading first, and search and breadcrumbs keep a deep tree usable.

Every link you send has a timer

This is worth learning once, because the whole portal behaves the same way. Nothing you share is a permanent address. A share link lasts one, three, seven, fourteen or thirty days — your choice — and can be revoked before that. The link itself never contains the file's address: when the client clicks it, HUB creates a fresh one that dies in ten minutes. Downloads work the same way, which is why a file in HUB is never sitting at a public URL somebody could stumble into.

The same mechanism carries the Application Form link and Knowledge Base articles. Learn it in one place and every “send this to my client” button in the portal behaves the way you already expect.

When your space runs low the bar turns red before it becomes a problem, and Request more space puts the request in front of AOL. Once it is approved your quota changes by itself.

§4 · Your clients and your day

Everything about a client, in one place

The client list is searchable by name, company or email. Opening a client gives you six tabs — and the second one is the reason brokers stop emailing themselves photographs.

The Media tab takes files by dragging them in, records a voice note on the spot, and runs photographs through an editor before they are saved: crop against an ID-card, A4, square or wide frame, straighten a crooked scan, apply a black-and-white filter that makes a phone photo read like a scanner, sign or write on it by hand, then compress it so it is not a nine-megabyte passport.

Agenda

Calls, video calls and meetings in one list, grouped as Upcoming, Today, Past or All. An appointment can be attached to a client, and marking it done is one tap. Today's items appear on your dashboard, so the first screen you see already tells you who you are speaking to.

§5 · Operations

Following the deal

Operations is the live side: the transactions you are in, the instruments you want, the banks you work with, and where your payouts go.

Transactions are read-only, with tabs for All, Active, Lost and Ceased, and search by code or borrower. Opening one shows the whole shape of the deal in four blocks — and one of them you write yourself.

Request Bond asks AOL for a new instrument: currency, face value, a note. Your previous requests keep their status, so you can see what is still pending.

Bank Acceptance registers the banks you work with — name, BIC, country, amount, currency, and whether you are on the borrower or the lender side. The back office reviews each one and the decision comes back to you.

Wallet holds the addresses your payouts go to, in euro, dollar, sterling and Swiss franc, plus USDT and USDC. One tap copies an address; adding or deleting one asks you to confirm.

§6 · Security, in plain words

Why your book stays your book

A vault door is not one piece of steel. It is a plate, a ring of bolts, a dial, inner steel, and a ledger of who opened it. HUB is built the same way, and each layer does one job you can describe in a sentence.

The layer that matters most to you is the dial. Every question the portal asks is limited to your book — your clients, your contacts, your transactions, your files. Another broker's client does not appear to you as something hidden that you are not allowed to see. It appears as something that does not exist.

That is a different promise from encryption, and a more useful one. Encryption stops a stranger reading your files in transit. This stops the person at the next desk seeing your client list.

If you forget your password, you fix it yourself: ask for a reset, and a single-use link arrives by email and stops working after an hour. HUB gives the same answer whether or not the address is one it knows, so nobody can use that page to find out who banks with AOL.

§7 · What’s new

Seven things you could not do before

The 2026 rebuild is not a new coat of paint. Each of these is something the portal simply did not do, or did not do this way.

Where to start

Three things, in this order, and you will have used the parts that matter.

Help is one address: customerservice@aol-lending.com, with written replies within 24 hours. The bell in the header collects everything that happens without you — a client opening a link you sent, a borrower downloading a form, a deadline coming up — and every alert takes you straight to the page it is about.

Appendix · The menu

Every destination, and what you do there

Dashboard at the top, then four dropdowns. That is the whole portal.