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One of the industry’s top young loan writers has opened a new brokerage that targets Gen Y with a holistic, technology-based offering.
Marshall Condon, winner of the Rising Star award for Victoria at The Adviser’s 2015 Better Business Awards and the number 30-ranked broker in last year’s Elite Business Writers list, has stepped down as the managing director of Mortgage Choice’s South Yarra franchise and established his own business, Neue Black, earlier this month.
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With the tagline ‘Enabling the next generation to own their own future’, Mr Condon is targeting the younger demographic – the “aspirational millennial” – by providing a one-stop shop for all their finance needs.
“We don’t want to alienate any type of finance,” he told The Adviser. “We’re trying to position ourselves as an accessible private bank that caters for all finance needs. Whatever type of finance you need, we can source it and manage it for you, and have that one point of contact with various providers rather than a bank which is only offering its own products.”
“We’re also looking to add a wealth management proposition to our offering over the next 12 months. I don’t think we’ll go with the traditional model of recruiting a financial planner – we’re more looking at using technology to add more services for clients like robo-advice.”
Mr Condon said one of the key things he wants to do at Neue Black is educate the younger demographic about making financial decisions and growing their wealth.
“We want to get the message across that they can build their wealth as well as their lifestyle if you have the right advice, which is our positioning,” he said.
With the official brand launch scheduled for February, Mr Condon said the new brand will be marketed heavily using LinkedIn and Facebook. Neue Black will also be sending out e-newsletters to its networks as well as blogs and updates on market conditions.
“We’ve engaged with an agency to help with that, so we’re going to be investing a lot in digital marketing,” he said. “We’re also engaging with a PR firm to help get the brand out there.”
According to Mr Condon, Neue Black has been in the works for approximately 12 months, and it took four months to decide on the company’s name.
“I was quite pedantic in terms of making [the name] different from what’s out there at the moment,” he admitted. “I really wanted it to be seen as a standalone brand, so I didn’t want ‘wealth’ or ‘finance’ anywhere in the title.”
Although Mr Condon will lose all of his existing clients to Mortgage Choice, he is excited to be starting from scratch because “we can grow the types of clients we want to attract rather than what we have”.
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