John Flavell's CV reads like a who's who of the mortgage industry.
In the general manager of NAB Broker's 17 year career, he has worked with Westpac, RAMS, Aussie and NAB and sat across the board room table from some of the most influential figures in the mortgage industry.
"I'm fortunate to have worked directly with end customers, in non-bank lending and in this lending role."
Flavell took property valuation at Melbourne's RMIT. While he graduated as a valuer in 1993, he never actually got around to practicing as one. His first job was at Westpac, who were trialling the concept of home finance managers at the time.
"I got a role there as one of the first and really took to it like a duck to water and thoroughly enjoyed it - meeting people, getting out and getting involved. I did that for a couple years and being an ambitious type I kept my eyes and ears open and an opportunity came up at RAMS."
Nobody knew much about the relatively new start-up in 1995 and Flavell was made the general manager of Vic, Tas and SA, which he says was a big title, but not really a big role.
"We had five lending managers in the field, we had five credit people and about 500 leads and settling about $5m when I started."
It was still a small operation, but Flavell says it was an exciting time to be involved as he was in the room with John Kinghorn and the other directors when they were forming the company's strategy and developing the brand.
"It was a great time to be in that business and I learned a lot in a short time," he says.
Within three years, RAMS grew significantly. Flavell's team went from five agents in the field to 50 working in regional Vic, SA and Tas. While the average loan amount was only about $120k, RAMS was settling in the vicinity of $60m-70m a month.
Flavell says the experience really taught him about running sales teams. It also gave him a chance to spend time in the field with customers and work on the non-bank lending side.
From RAMS, Flavell had a change of industry. A position at Telstra opened up in Sydney in 1998. At the time the telecommunications company was looking to bring in managers that had experience in growing sales, but not necessarily in the telco industry. He started as an account director and ran a team of people in business to business sales. Flavell was there for four years, in time to witness both the dot.com boom and the crash.
"So I learned a lot about big corporations, and I learned a lot around working with people as business partners, as opposed to providers of basic services."
In 2002, the career wheel spun round again for Flavell and his old contacts at RAMS got in touch with him about an opportunity with Aussie, which he describes as a "great brand, great capability, great company".
Flavell joined just as Aussie was launching into the mortgage market.
"So I was there when they were going through a pretty significant change that really shook up the whole industry and that was great to really go through that change as we grew the business really, really aggressively."
Flavell worked as state manager for NSW and stayed with the mortgage giant until three years ago.
"At that point in time I was keen to do what was next. I thought it was good time to build a financial planning arm to Aussie and they weren't that focused on it at that point."
Through Flavell's dealings in the industry he met NAB's Matt Lawler, whom he discovered shared a lot of the same business philosophies, as both were looking at the potential for brokers to move into providing a broader range of solutions to their customers.
So Flavell switched camps and started with what was then the Homeside business in November 2006.
"And soon after we re-launched the business as NAB Broker and really started to go out and expand our capability in terms of working with brokers as business partners to provide a broader range of solutions, from mortgages, to insurance, to term deposits."
Flavell was named general manager of NAB Broker in October after NAB announced the restructuring of its personal banking division. Under NAB Broker, Flavell oversees the Homeside, MLC, Allianz and Vivid sections of the business.
"Our vision is to work with brokers as business partners to enable them to provide a complete and broad range of financial solutions to their end customers and my role enables me to work across the industry with the aggregators and the brokers to develop a better understanding of their needs as business people as well as their needs for customers. It's all about being a trusted adviser across a range of people's financial requirements."
Advice model
Three years ago, there was interest in the advice model, but interest has transformed into action, Flavell says.
"When people talk about their business, 'advice' comes into it more and more. Interest and talk have shifted to fascination and in the last 12 months there's been a shift to action. From an industry perspective there's been a number of challenges, certainly in times of complexity people are looking for guidance."
In some ways, Flavell says the GFC has pushed brokers to expand their services to customers.
"At the end of the day any industry will flourish or flounder based on the value that consumers place on the services provided. And in difficult times people really value advice."
As brokers move to offering a broader range of services, Flavell says many will be advancing their own education. But he stopped short of saying Cert. IV would be inadequate for brokers going forward.
"We believe that education is good for the industry, so when we launched our star rating scheme 12 months ago, we made education an element of that and it was something we did to reward that because we think it's good for the industry. Then if brokers are going to continue to be sought out for the expertise and the advice they provide then I think customers will seek those who have grown and developed. And you are already see brokers saying not what's the minimum that I can take, but what other opportunities are out there? And what will really differentiate my business."
NAB/Challenger
The biggest changes and challenges facing NAB is its acquisition of Challenger's mortgage aggregation arm - newly re-branded as "Advantedge", which encompasses the PLAN, FAST and Choice Aggregation businesses.
Flavell spent much of October on the road talking to brokers and allaying fears that those belonging to the Advantedge family would get... er, an advantage.
"The way that my team interacts with them will be the way that it always has been, in that we'll be out there actively competing for their businesses."
Flavell admits the Advantedge players represent a big part of the market, but he adds "it's not the only part of the market".
"And if my team aren't continuing to go out and build successful relationships with the rest of the market then we wouldn't reach our objectives. So we've got to be out there working with everyone else and delivering a strong proposition to them as well."
He adds: "The reality is the structure we've set up and the approach that we're taking is that it's an even playing field and we're keen to get business across the entire market and that's the approach we take. People listen to the words, but it's by your actions that you'll be judged."