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Vision has restructured, splitting its two businesses into separate arms and relaunching its aggregation offering to market.
Previously, Vision’s retail broker and aggregation divisions operated closely and were melded together, but the company has now decided to build out and separate the two businesses as part of a relaunch and rebrand.
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The retail side functions under the name Vision Property and Finance, while the aggregator operates under Vision Aggregation.
Vision partner David Lennox revealed to The Adviser that the rebranding has been part of a two-year process, with the company gearing up to relaunch and grow its aggregator business.
“We’ve done a lot of behind the scenes, building our infrastructure and scaling up so that we can cope with the rigours of aggregation, compliance and mentoring and how you communicate with your broker and all of that,” Mr Lennox said.
“And now we’re in a position to tell the market about the fresh branding and separate it out from that other Vision branding that we have.”
The process has involved expanding the team and building the foundation and tools necessary for the aggregation business.
“The easy thing is bringing in new people. The hard thing is paying for them and paying for all the other stuff we’ve got to build,” Mr Lennox explained.
“We’ve resourced it up, we’ve made investment decisions, to invest in two extremely experienced people. And in IT and time, we really had our heads down for 18 months, building stuff like a revamped commission system, building new compliance processes, the way we communicate, we’ve moved everything to the cloud.
“You have proper teams channel with all our brokers, the way we do webinars, the way we can help brokers when they’ve got problems, all those things – we do very well now.”
Helen Keepkie, operations manager at Vision, was one of the key hires for the transformation process. She noted the business has produced a new CRM system to add to its other developments in the last 18 months.
Leighton King, business development manager at Vision, previously saw rapid expansion in a prior role as general manager of Vow Financial – where the business scaled from 300 brokers to 1,300.
With Vision Aggregation, he noted, the infrastructure and planning has been prioritised in its preparations for new brokers.
“We’ve built it, and then they will come. We’ve got things covered off, so you don’t have this big growth story with all these drop-offs, issues and problems, and unhappy brokers,” Mr King told The Adviser.
“We’ve done a hell of a lot of work to make sure that we are prepared for growth, which is a very smart way of doing it. It’s costly, but it’s definitely the best way to do it, and we’ve got everything in place to exponentially grow our business in the coming months.”
Vision Aggregation is promoting a flat fee of $595, another factor expected to attract broker interest, Mr King said, highlighting that other groups either do not offer flat fees or can charge fees as high as $1,000.
Although the business has plans for growth, Mr Lennox declared it still wants to maintain a “close-fitting” boutique feel.
Vision partner Matt Ivers echoed Mr Lennox, commenting: “Our main driver is production per broker and a good cultural family feel, rather than being the biggest and largest and having the most troops.
“We’re not a very large broker, but we’re happy bringing on the right people that fit here, and the right people who really look after their customers is our driver.”
Vision initially began as a retail brokerage in 2000, dealing directly with customers, before it branched out into boutique aggregation.
But it stayed in the retail broking space, “unlike probably a lot of other aggregators”, Mr Ivers commented.
“We are still across the actual detail of the industry,” he said.
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