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Hello everyone and welcome to this Australian broker panel discussion where we're holding a curtain raiser for the Australian mortgage awards in the category of brokerage of the year 6 to20 staff sponsored by non-bank Resimac. Today we'll be discussing the ins and outs of success for this particular size of brokerage and hearing from our nominees who are all excellent examples of getting things right in this niche. We're privileged to have Mimi Jawad, national sales manager, aggregation and

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partnerships at Resimac to lead off. Hello Mimi. >> Hi Bennett. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for being here. On the broker side, we have Russell Munfaredi, Mortgage Pros, Connor Perry, Money Links. Matt Spears, Evoke Capital. Chris Raymond, Unconditional Finance. Andrew Thompson, Loan Market Ignite. Heinrich Bindle, Blue Crane Capital. Peter Colman, Aussie Prospect, Nitish Kumar, Loan Market CRA, Ryan Sweeney, Front Financial, and Richard Garner, Crew Financial. Welcome to you all. To kick off, I'm going to ask Mimi

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to talk about what success might look like for a brokerage with 6 to 20 staff and why this prize is so important before we move over to our lucky nominees. Over to you, Mimi. >> Thanks, Bennett. So, success in a brokerage of 6 to 20 staff is about building sustainable growth where you still can give your customers the service that they deserve. It's about leaning into the assets that you have available to you, whether that be your aggregator, your peer, and these days AI. And that's why this award matters

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because it's recognizing the brokers that are performing now and building strong foundations for future success. >> Great. Thanks a lot. All right. Now, on to the questions and our first one is about growth and performance. So, Russell, I'm going to start with you. How has your brokerage grown over the past year and what's driven that trajectory? >> We hired more brokers. Our bottleneck was mainly the ability to assess files. Uh we couldn't handle as big of volume that was we could have gotten access to

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with our marketing but we had to tone down the marketing. Uh after capitalizing on a few AI agents that simplified and improved the quality of the process of assessment, we hired two new brokers, Patrick and Dustin. Now we have six brokers on the sales team. That was the main contributor for that. >> Okay, thanks a lot. All right, moving on to uh Connor. What's your take on this? Yeah, Bennett. For us, um, yeah, we had a big growth in our year. It was 71% year on year for us. And, uh, for

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us, we're a team of 17, uh, five brokers and 12 support staff. And the one of the big things that we've prioritized is, uh, is making sure that we're sort of creating a high performance culture in our group and making sure that sort of we're really imposing accountability on on sort of all of the individual brokers. And look that resulted over um over the last financial year of every broker not only individually having uh their record year but as a group yeah seeing sort of huge

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uptick in in in what we do and um and as a group you know really honing in not only on the accountability piece but having quarterly focus is that sort of the whole team can get around. So rather than just sort of you know each broker having their own KPIs you know having a quarterly focus where we can sort of bring in every person in our team you know the people that assist with collecting documents you know the client care team um and the brokers to make sure that the quarterly focus is

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sort of allow us all to get behind it and all to um play you know their respective part. So yeah sort of a real collaborative approach of um yeah sort of helping everyone be their best. Okay, great. Thanks a lot. All right, uh Matt, um let's hear from you. >> In terms of our growth, um similar to Connor for us, you know, we probably grew about 80% year near and it was mainly attributed to hiring and scaling our credit team. Um and also looking to bring in new brokers. Uh we also focused

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on marketing, which wasn't something that we had lent into before in our previous sort of 5 and a half years in business. So for us, I guess bringing great individuals into our business, you know, continuing to lean on our current source of business and getting really close to our clients has, you know, generated additional business in a great market. >> Okay, great. All right, Chris, moving on to you. >> Uh, we had a record year last year as well. uh our business unconditional finance. We settled north of 500 million

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and we are a very high volume office and you know that was close to a thousand loans settled by my team in the last financial year. I guess what I contribute that to is you know getting the right people for the right roles. We really sort of peeled apart our back office our end to end process and you know putting the right people in the right positions is part of the reason why we grew. Um, and we also sort of doubled down on the value that we add to our existing clients in terms of we've got VAS obviously doing pricing every

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six months, but we've also got a team member now that we've dedicated to looking after our um, existing customer base. So, they're doing reviews, obviously speaking with them about their longer term goals and things like that. So, yeah, they're probably the main reasons. We actually had less staff members this financial year just finished compared to the previous one, but we've actually written more volume as well. So I think we've just got a little bit smarter around how we

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actually operate as a business and you know obviously clients are getting a better experience on the back of that and that's obviously contributed to our growth. >> Great. Thanks a lot. Uh Andrew guys, we opened our third office last year. We added two more brokers. Uh we're a huge believer of link sigma and process improvement. So we're continually doing that. I think between the office the embracing of AI um that's probably key drivers into our into our growth. But yeah, the third office

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expansion uh and just building that out. >> So, Hinrich, >> of course. Um, so for us at Blue Crane, we've grown substantially in the FY 26 year. In terms of results, we've uh we've grown both on settlement volume and deal quantity by about 45%. The way we've done it is in certain aspects quite simple. It's rewinding to 12 months ago sitting down together around one table and setting big ambitious goals and being quite unwavering in how and when we want to achieve those.

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For us it's really boiling it down to two major components which is people having the high performance people and individuals in the team who can deliver on those expectations and then also our systems and processes uh effectively allowing those high performance individuals to achieve those goals. >> It's a good one. All right. So Peter, what's your take? >> Yeah. So very similar to Heinrich uh very much built the only grew on the team that was there at the at present at

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the moment but probably more of a focus around our diversification and obviously where we can find additional opportunities within our customer remits also extending that out to referral relationship partners extending out the olive branch around you know being more of a community focused business rather than just a bespoke go home loan specialist. >> Okay. Uh, Nitish, uh, what do you think on this one? >> Yeah, very similar to the other two guys we've just spoken. Um, big focus for us

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this year was developing our brokers and getting them to be more productive. So, spent a lot of time on building their teams, making them into leaders so they can lead their own teams. We also diversified into asset finance about 13 months ago, which was a great offering to be able to give to our clients because we were primarily doing residential home loans. >> And Ryan, let's hear from you firstly. Um so for us I guess over the first over the last year our kind of growth kind of stemmed from having like a clear niche

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and then doubling down on that niche. Um so our business we specialize in advising small medium business owners on how to where to borrow money um across banks and also non-banks as well. So I think the focusing on the self-employed aspect has been a major driver for our growth. You know the focus has allowed us to give a deeper expertise rather than trying to be everything to everyone. Um it's also meant that we can support the same type of client across a wide range of scenarios and also our FIFA service

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model has also been a critical growth factor. Um it's given us number one the ability to invest in our credit operations, marketing, client service infrastructure, you know, rather than just relying on the one-man band type model. It's managed us to have like every part of the transaction and being able to give the support the client actually needs. I guess by specializing and kind of going an inch wide and mold deep, it's just created a broader demand. You know, lots of referrals from

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from business owners dealing with the same issue. Um that's what's now enabled us to have a good operating model to build from there and expand into growth. >> Great. Thanks very much. Okay. And uh Richard, >> yeah, to answer your question, um so growth and performance and what we've done. So for us, this year's been one of our strongest years in history. Um we're up around 62% uh year on year adding about another 110 mil or thereabouts. Approval rates sitting at around 84 12%. For us, it's

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what we're probably most proud of is that the fact it's been consistent every year. So we've had a growth in that sort of magnitude for a long time. And if I think about what's driven it, it's been more than just basic hustle. Um, we stopped working as individual brokers and built out a fully-fledged team. Specifically, we've got specialists in each role all around the client for whether it be call centers, got associate brokers sitting on calls now. I've got credit tame split onshore,

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offshore, and dedicated settlements. So, I realized that that's not exactly revolutionary, but it's really about just getting consistency and making sure we've got specialists in each roles and that's really enhanced our approval rates and conversion rates. Um, the other thing too is it's like uh for us just having a really comprehensive and integrated tech stack has made an enormous difference much further than what say a traditional aggregator would put together for us. So we've got an

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enormous uh investment in uh in it that's really started to pay dividend so we can start heading into sort of that half a billion plus to a billion type trajectory. The other thing we've sort of focused on is to becoming more of an entire ecosystem rather than just a mortgage brokerage. That diversification piece um has been very important. So now we've got wealth and property and property management sitting alongside our core mortgage broking business as well. Okay, short and sweet. All right, moving

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on to the uh second focus here uh team system and technology. So, how has your team structure or use of technology evolved over the past year and what impact has that had on your brokerages capacity and performance? So, some of you already touched on this, but uh Russell, have you got a fresh take here? Yeah, I would say the segregation of the rules uh and having clear defined roles and outcomes for each department that allowed us to write significantly more. Last year we finished on 1.3 billion.

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We're just six brokers. I believe we are the highest efficiency per broker company in the industry. And I believe we're going to go down the path of utilizing more of the AI to be able to be more efficient on the assessment side. And I think this year all six of my brokers are going to be in the top 100 in the MPA. >> Great. Okay, Connor, uh your take on the technology question. >> Yeah, technology obviously a big talking point with uh you know AI and um and you know everyone talking about the

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jobs that AI is going to replace, but I truly believe that AI hasn't replaced the personal side of broken. Uh if anything, I think it's just given us more capacity to focus on what's important, which is the client experience. So, you know, we've got a team that can, you know, process a large amount of deals and, you know, we've really utilized technology to improve the time efficiency, of course, but allow brokers to spend more time and put more effort into uh actually the client

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and the client journey. And as a result, you know, that's resulted in in um in more opportunities for us. You know, majority of our business is generated through word of mouth referrals and we're not relying in any way on referral partners. So just um yeah the main the main sort of benefit we've seen the technology is just uh embracing the client experience and yeah that's resulted in a in a large proportion of our business. >> Okay, that's a good answer. All right,

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Matt, uh let's hear from you. >> Yeah, for us systems and process has been at the core of I guess how we've achieved the results we've had uh in business to date. In terms of what we've changed, we we've moved to a new aggregation system where we got really deep in terms of the automation. So it helped increase I guess the role segregation that we had. Um so everybody I guess has everything really well automated to be able to progress and we're looking at how AI can look to step

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in and take some of those tasks off back office teams. So I sort of see you know AI still in its infancy but I probably seeing it take away some of the reliance that we have on offshore and it now [clears throat] continuing to enable great conversations with our brokers. >> Okay, good. Thank you. All right, Chris Teams system and technology. what's your take? >> Yeah, we sort of realigned our teams um both onshore and offshore. So, our Australian brokers um are aligned and they had the same targets as well as

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their credit analysts here in Australia and then also their VA partner overseas and that sort of allowed our team to focus they're more aligned in terms of you know what goals are we trying to achieve both uh you know financially but also most importantly for our customers as well. So, um, that's probably one of the big things. Um, you know, we've got a clear career path here at Unconditional Finance as well. So, I think, you know, having that, you know, clear career path, um,

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allows our team to perform at their, you know, maximum capabilities as well. Um, and we've also really put a focus on our presubmission process. You know, we want to be touching our deals majority of the time, one touches when we do submit the deals. So, our efficiency's really gone up as well. And then as Matt said before, you know, we've put a lot of focus into we're with the same aggregator into our automations as well. So where can we automate a lot of those low hanging fruit tasks and you know

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that's taken some time to obviously implement. Um but that is going well as well but yeah we also want to focus on the customer service side as well. So yeah >> good. Thank you very much. Andrew, what do you think? >> Yeah, for us it's continuing. We're really big on culture. So high performance, high support, um you know, upskilling and upgrading people. We've had two of our credit analysts become brokers. So that's a really big part of our journey and making sure that they

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can come on that with us. Uh I think AI is it's evolving. You've just got to keep leaning in and adapting and adding in the components that make it uh make it work for you and make it work for your customers. So they're probably the key parts for us. >> Okay, great. Uh that's a good answer. All right. So, the next uh thing I'm going to grill you on is uh client experience and industry standing. So, the question is, how do you approach client experience and broker development

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at your brokerage and what recognition or feedback from clients or industry partners uh reflect that? So, Hinrich, let's start with you again. >> Thanks so much. Yeah. Um, for us it's about clear communication. Uh, clear and heat and early communication, not waiting to be followed up by a client before you give them an answer or get in touch with them. It's about being proactive, getting in early and just being super super clear. And then in addition, it's internally how we

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operate. It makes it easy because we operate in pod systems. So effectively every client has a broker contact with an associate/analyst running it alongside and then obviously the support over and above. Um in terms of feedback obviously there's metrics like Google reviews and awards nominations which it does mean a lot but ultimately although the biggest markers for me is repeat customers and then the fact that referral partners keep sending us and keeps trusting us with their clients.

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>> Okay. Thank you. All right, Peter, let's hear from you. >> Yeah, look, obviously for ourselves being under that franchise model, it's important for myself and the and Matt and Bell, the franchise of Aussie prospect to ensure that we follow that that bouncing ball. So no matter who what customer you're dealing with, there the slow on the threat through inquiry through to settlement is the same. Therefore, the journey remains aligned to the Aussie prospect values. uh we

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hold regular morning meetings with this with the broker team just to ensure that we're sharing best practice and that we you know ensuring that we're sticking to those guidelines and not falling off track. Obviously there's regular one-on- ones with the sales teams around you know conversations through customer journeys but obviously making sure that our communication is very clear uh through that short period and we're not leaving things too late. From a feedback perspective uh we're

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very big on Google My Business. So GMBB and obviously Aussie themselves have got their own net promoter score system. So uh surveys are sent out to customers post appointment and post settlement. So just keeping an eye on those keeping track of those. But more importantly we do have a broker meeting every Tuesday and those are called out as a congratulations to ensure that the both the broker team and the PA team are obviously congratulated on the work they've done with that with those customers.

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>> Okay, good. All right, Nitish, what do you think? Yeah, very similar. I don't think communication can ever be too much for a client. I've never had a client complain that they've heard from us too much. Um, so communication is pretty important for the client's point of view. They always have more than one person in the office who they can contact about their loan if they are waiting. But generally speaking, the rule is if the client's calling us for an update, we're probably not

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communicating enough with them. Uh, feedback wise, similar. We are very big on Google reviews. We've got 700 five star Google reviews in seven years. So that's pretty important from our point of view that the brokers are providing a service the where the client feels comfortable to be able to do a five star Google review and that's been very helpful in getting new clients to the business as well. Um and then repeat clients and client referrals are another metric we use to measure that feedback.

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>> Good. Thank you. Okay, Ryan, client experience and industry standing. Let's hear from you. Yeah. So, our brokerage with the types, as I mentioned on the first part of it, with our types of clients that we deal with, I guess our experience needs to be shaped a little bit differently to what the traditional kind of brokerage model does. Um, so we have like a high very highly structured way that the client onboards with us. Um, because a lot of these situations that we see are quite complex or quite nuanced and a little

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bit different from what the average broker would see. We make sure that we have a very structured approach. That would be making sure that everything's done on Teams calls, making sure everything's recorded. Um, the client will get a first call of 15 to 20 minutes that they'll sit on a discovery call so they understand what our business is about. We want to understand their situation requirements in detail. Generally, we'll take, you know, 2 hours before we even get to getting some

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documents off them so they understand who they're working with. Um, post that call, we'll do a full analysis on their on their situation and take them through their options through what we call like a proposal meeting. Um, so typically by the time the client gets up to seeing what their options are, we've built general rapport with them. They understand our business model. They understand who our types of clients are. They understand what their options are and typically very engaged with our

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business. Um the reason we did that is because dealing with self-employed people with extremely uh complex structures, they need to have feel like they've got a love. They have an expert on their team. They've got a team of people around them that understand their actual needs and requirement in detail. And then similar to what the other teams other guys here have said, um you know, we've got in our business, you don't just deal with one broker. You might deal with two or three team members or

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brokers who are all at the same quality. you know, accessibility 247, seven days a week is our kind our motto. So, that's a really important thing for us. And then, similar to what everyone else says, Google reviews from verified business owners is super important. You know, it's it helps every single business and it gives the validation. And then, you know, with our business been open for 2 years, so it's been a short period of time to be up for heaps of nominations and winning a few

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awards. Obviously, great recognition and it's good for our business to um be finally getting some recognition as well. Okay, good. And last but not least, Richard, >> in terms of um uh our client experience, industry recognition and so on. So, if I put the client journey as the first and the most central piece for us, we we've always had a very deliberate and structured journey. And that's because we wanted to get away from clients chasing us for information to be ahead of the information. So um we I can tell

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you we've got a 34 point process for u maintaining coms. So that's and it really centers around a couple of things. It's like where are you now? What's happening next? How long is it going to take? And we can make sure we've got sort of micro journeys along the way and we can always remain true to label around what we're delivering for our customers. Right? So, uh, we found that that's meant that our clients always feel confident about where they're at and where they're going next

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and what's required of them at that particular time. Um, we don't want to just give them the whole journey up front in one big blur cuz they'll forget it. So, it's about having the relevant information at the right time. And that's something we've always had that's been in our DNA from the beginning of the uh the business. In terms of um awards and the like uh you know we've been the SFG best brokerage in Queensland for four or five years or something. Um I've personally won

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multiple brokerage awards and we've had mentoring and technology. So the tech piece for us has been center point uh it's all center place the whole way through because it's how we leverage our time. But what's interesting as well is is we've actually gone outside the traditional mortgage broking uh industry recognition. We've gone for um our kow niche market being aviation. We've participated in some of the actual aviation industry awards as well and being recognized as a um major

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contributor to the industry there in terms of um measurement. Right. So the things that we do measure are calls, call flows, uh internal SLAs's, we do obviously map Google reviews and that's an organic part of our process and we also conduct internal surveying as well. So we want to know what we're doing good. We want to know what we're doing, you know, where we can have improvement as well. And I think that it's an essential piece of the puzzle, essential component so that you always got that

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improving uh trajectory. But remember this is a the differences between many of our businesses is actually very small. So it's you're trying to find the 1% gains and for us if we can I mean time is so valuable and particularly when you start doing large volumes of transactions I know we do upwards of 500 a year and there businesses that do many more than that. That's when keystrokes start to make a difference. So for us, we're always looking at tiny places where we can get

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that 1% gain or shift even down to simple pieces of language. So that's our approach to it. >> No, that's good. That's good. All right. So yeah, the judges are going to have a tough job uh picking a winner, I think, but thank you all for your illuminating insights and good luck to all of you. Uh finally, let's just have a word from Mimi on what she's looking forward to uh at the awards night. Look, other than the opportunity to glam up and hit the town, the Australian

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Mortgage Awards are a great opportunity to down the tools um and spend some time recognizing and celebrating with the finalists and the winners. So, on behalf of ResMac, I wish you all the best of luck and we look forward to seeing you all there. >> And that concludes this Australian broker panel featuring Resimac and the AMA nominees for brokerage of the year 6 to 20 staff. Thanks to Mimi and also to Russell Munfaredi, Mortgage Pros, Connor Perry, Money Links, Matt Spears, Evoke Capital, Chris Raymond, Unconditional

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Finance, Andrew Thompson, Loan Market Ignite, Hinrich Brindle, Blue Crane Capital, Peter Coleman, Aussie Prospect, Nitish Kumar, Loan Market Cber, Ryan Sweeney, Front Financial, and Richard Garner at Crew Financial. Thanks for watching Australian Broker TV. Bye for now. [music]