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A prominent Sydney broker has announced plans to donate the prize money from his Australian Broking Award to a local university.
Greg Wells, director of Parramatta-based Wells Partners/Mortgage Link Group, was named Broker of the Year at The Adviser’s annual awards ceremony last month, and earned him a cheque for $10,000 from Commonwealth Bank.
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Mr Wells told The Adviser that the cash will fund prizes for finance and business students at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) in the hope of attracting new talent into the broking industry.
While initially thinking the money would help fund a family holiday to Hawaii, Mr Wells said he and his fellow directors contemplated ways to put the money to good use, and decided upon a scholarship-style arrangement with UWS.
“Domenic [Corigliano] who is my youngest director was the ex-dux of the university, said 'Why don't we do this?' which touches on… recruiting and trying to look at new, younger blood etc., so we adopted that suggestion,” Mr Wells said.
According to Mr Wells, recruiting talented young people has been a core focus for the broking industry in recent years. While suggesting that anecdotally the average broker age is falling, Mr Wells said there is still more to do to promote broking as a career choice among university students.
“I think we're competing as an industry against the likes of banks, so I guess it's about selling more the concept of broking as an industry and trying to highlight the growing demand there is for people in a marketplace that is growing,” Mr Wells explained.
“Unless you work in the industry, you're probably naive to [the fact] that broking is now such a dominant part of distribution.”
Ray Villarica, annual giving manager at UWS – which will rebrand at the end of this month to Western Sydney University – said that while the exact specifics of the arrangement are yet to be finalised, it is hoped that the donation will fund prizes for the next two years.
“We award some academic prizes to our top students each year, and it's basically in recognition of their achievements and it's also connecting them with business and industry, and vice versa,” he said.
“When I spoke to Wells Partners, it was [for them] also about building more momentum around student understanding that finance broking is a real career path, broadening the horizons of students to not just be fixed on a career in banking, but generate more awareness around the financial broking area.”
Mr Villarica said the prizes, which will likely be awarded from next year, go a long way to helping students as they prepare to begin their careers.
“Our initial talks have been around awarding five prizes per year for the next couple of years. There's typically a monetary value to the prize that's awarded to the student, to help with ongoing costs of study – textbooks and what have you. But with Wells Partners, they want to offer the students some work experience as well, so it's just a great example of a university and a growing industry collaborating on work futures,” he said.
[Related: Brokerage uses uni holidays to attract young talent]
