![New broker conference centre officially opens](/images/News_stories/ribbon-launch.jpg)
HomeSec Business Finance’s new conference and training facility in Victoria, which is free for brokers to use, has officially been opened by the federal member for Aston, Alan Tudge MP.
Earlier this year, short-term business lender HomeSec Business Finance announced that it had built a new training and conference centre in its office building in Melbourne.
The lender is offering the non-profit small-business incubator facility for use of finance brokers, broking groups, aggregators, small-business associations, business coaches and mentors free of charge.
The 80-seat auditorium has a fully equipped film studio, which brokers and other aforementioned groups can use at no cost to do their own promotional videos and podcasts.
The auditorium permanently occupies 50 per cent of the floor space in the firm’s building in Melbourne, with HomeSec having spent over $650,000 on the facility.
The venue has now been officially opened by Alan Tudge MP, federal member for Aston and minister for population, cities and urban infrastructure.
Speaking at the event, Mr Tudge applauded HomeSec and the brokers in attendance for providing finance services to small businesses, who are “the backbone of the economy” and thanked them for their work in supporting small businesses.
“This facility, which we are opening… hopefully supports the businesses and hopefully gets great use for them, so they can go on and thrive like your businesses have,” he said, adding he was “really proud to be part of this opening”.
HomeSec co-director Paul Stone and Jason Brockmuller said they were “thrilled” that Mr Tudge had agreed to officially open the centre.
Speaking at the event, Mr Stone commented: “Jason and I decided that the best way to help the industry is by giving brokers, aggregators and mentors the tools they can use to build their businesses.
“It’s like the old saying: ‘You can give a person a fish and they have got a meal. You can give a person a rod and teach them how to fish and they can feed themselves for a liftetime’. So, we decided to provide our broker partners and other non-competing companies in the finance industry a space where they can hold promotional events, seminars, product and development days, and training conferences. Plus, they can also use the studio to do their own podcasts and their own promo videos…
“We then decided to take it one step further, and we thought the facility should be open to all small businesses to use, to help them grow and develop from small businesses to strong businesses. And it’s all free of charge.
“This is our way of saying thank you, and our way of giving back to the finance industry and to small business,” he said.
Mr Stone also thanked the Liberal MP for his support of the broker channel, particularly during the royal commission of 2019.
Indeed, speaking at the event, Mr Tudge noted that it was a “pretty close call” with the royal commission recommendations.
He acknowledged that while the party had made “some small steps” in deviating from the recommendation, “it actually was because of the work of the industry itself, the broking industry, in terms of raising their concerns directly to MPs and ministers, like myself, through the public campaigns really understanding deeply what impact that would have had that we actually decided to make the decisions that we did and secure the future of the mortgage broking industry.”
He added that had the industry disappeared, it would have just “empowered the big banks” because brokers “bring greater competition into the market”.
[Related: Short-term lender launches in-house auditorium]