The visa application system is too confusing with government guidelines that leave people in the dark.
The claim comes from Gareth Richards, founder of a new service that helps applicants with their visa submissions.
Richards describes the way people get help with preparing their visa applications as “broken”.
“I’ve spoken to thousands of people over the years who are at the point of submitting their visa application and it didn’t matter if they were based in Cairo, Beijing or Johannesburg, they all had the same question: ‘is my visa correctly prepared?’ It was heart-breaking to see so many people at that point in the visa application process – literally minutes away from handing over their documents – and still not knowing whether their visa application was properly prepared.”
The reason for this, says Richards is that visa applicants are unclear on the application process with published guidelines difficult to understand.
“Government guidelines tend to be written using a special type of language that makes it harder for the average person to understand. While the information put out by official visa application centre service providers usually only covers their part of the application process and not the end-to-end customer journey,” he says.
“What you have as a visa applicant is several different versions of the customer journey, some better written than others. But you very rarely get a sufficiently detailed view of what you need to go through as a service user from end-to-end. That’s why immigration advice services are so useful, as they give you the opportunity to ask detailed questions of a qualified professional about any part of the process you don’t understand.”
Immigration advisers and solicitors exist, but Richards says the company’s own research shows that people didn’t know where to look for them – or how to know they can be trusted.
“The process of appointing one of these organisations to help you is like buying car insurance back in the 1990s, except instead of the Yellow Pages, you’re starting the search with Google,” he says.
This process can be time-consuming and with mixed results.
Help with my visa!
To combat the problem, Richards– who has established and operated almost 150 visa application centres in 90 different countries – has launched a digital marketplace for buying and selling immigration advice services.
Help with my visa! lets people search for immigration advisers and solicitors on a digital marketplace and then book and pay for an appointment online. Users can have an appointment booked with an immigration adviser or solicitor within three minutes at any time, from any device.
Richards says immigration advisers and solicitors are vetted prior to joining the marketplace to make sure they have the correct regulatory registrations and are financially stable. The company is also considering badges to signal quality and accreditations so that it’s clear to users can be trusted.
The firm has also taken a ‘privacy by design’ approach, as Richards says the business “can be an absolute minefield” for handling personal data.
“We don’t gather any passport or biographic information, and we don’t handle any supporting documents,” he says. “All we need to run the marketplace is a name and email address, along with the user’s consent to connect them to the immigration services firm.”
Richards says the firm is now embarking on an expansion programme to recruit more immigration advisers and solicitors to the marketplace.
