A word from NAB

Despite the challenges of the past year, the broking industry continues to thrive, and the essential role brokers play has never been more important.

Brokerages at the top of their game build strong relationships, help customers cut market complexity, and deliver exceptional service guiding Australians through some of the most important financial decisions of their lives.

As the bank behind the broker, NAB is proud to be championing The Adviser’s Top 25 Brokerages, who have all gone above and beyond to support home and business owners during an extraordinary time.

NAB continues to prioritise and invest in the broker channel. Our focus for the road ahead is on simplification and digitising the lending experience. We want to be the most reliable bank for brokers and ensure consistent and predictable service, so you can continue to focus on what you do best.

On behalf of NAB, I would like to congratulate this year’s standout brokerages for leading the way in adapting to customer needs and continually raising the bar in a dynamic market.

01 Loan Market

Taking the top spot in the Top 25 Brokerages 2022 ranking is the ever-growing Loan Market Group. For this ranking, we’ve only included Loan Market brokers (excluding the figures from PLAN, Choice and FAST) but the data shows that growth is a key theme for this major brokerage. We caught up with Andrea McNaughton, managing director of Loan Market, to find out more.

What do you attribute to Loan Market’s success?

Enabling brokers to find and keep more clients through industry-leading tech and by insourcing the recruitment of quality support staff has played a big part in driving our achievements.

Success in business shouldn’t be a question of broker or tech; it should be broker and tech, and we’ve held that mindset in everything we do.

We’ve doubled our brokers’ Google My Business reviews via the developed “Loan Market Way” – a best interests duty-proof digital solution. From transforming dull credit guides into a dynamic profiling tool for the broker, to our BID Notes Helper, our tech provides our brokers with the confidence that they’re acting compliantly and more efficiently, so they can keep focused on providing clients with a faster more seamless customer experience, as evidenced by our NPS.

We’ve also helped brokers take advantage of record lead volumes to grow productivity levels through fully trained support specialists.

What was Loan Market’s biggest achievement in 2021?

We won some major accolades: Australian Digital Technology Awards (Mortgages), Marketing Platform of the Year at the Australian Broking Awards, Number 1 in the Brokers on Aggregators Survey for the fourth year running, MFAA Aggregator of the Year, Professional Development Program of the Year and Diversity & Inclusion Program of the Year.

But our biggest achievement was our brokers’ average NPS of +96 recorded since July.

Our brokers can take the credit – they’re the ones at the coalface – and we’re thrilled to help them notch the record levels of satisfaction using our tech and in-house support services.

Our Kaizen continuous training streamlines brokers’ processes so they can deliver an awesome, ongoing customer experience. This is supported in our digital journey with features like our innovative “Game Plan” and more.

Most importantly, our business owners have continued to deliver amazing service while the number of customers they’ve helped, year-on-year, has more than doubled.

Additionally, we’ve found, onboarded and trained hundreds of new brokers and support staff to help our business owners leverage the booming market conditions.

What will be the franchise brokerage’s main points of focus for the next 6 months?

Expanding BrokerForce – our insourced specialist processing team – to help businesses scale faster and the official launch of “Brokerversity” – our solution for training new brokers looking to join established teams who are looking to keep scaling their growth.

BrokerForce is a game changer for productivity. Over October, BrokerForce saved brokers an average of 15 hours in processing time – that’s time they’ve won back to help their team focus on delivering excellent service and engaging new clients. We’re looking to further enhance productivity through this initiative, enabling brokers to scale their businesses faster.

Under the leadership of head of business improvement and Kaizen master Michael Zavelberg, our broker support teams will continue to be trained to unlock growth for businesses through LSS Kaizen principles.

We’ll continue to keep our integrated digital solutions seamless for customers – from our all-encompassing and award-winning MyCRM through to our online lead solution for referrers and clients.

What’s your top tip for running a leading brokerage?

A business can’t outgrow its leader. It’s very hard to scale a broker’s business at a good margin without a clear and strong proposition. This always comes back to the quality of the leadership. We have seen huge growth, not just in the number of loans our brokers write, but also in the size of their teams. Business owners who work hard to become great leaders are being sought out by smaller brokers and specialist staff looking to grow.

Business owners can take advantage of the current market conditions not just to write more loans, but by investing for growth. Brokers are delivering exceptional outcomes for customers. Now is a great time to introduce new revenue lines by driving additional in-house services and deeper expertise – to sustain and deliver amazing services to more new and existing clients by growing the quality of their team.

02 Aussie

It’s been a year of change for Aussie, as it joined the Lendi Group to become a multichannel distribution model. The chief executive of distribution, Brad Cramb, outlines how it all works

What do you attribute to Aussie’s success?

The key to our success is the 1,000+ small-business owners who represent Aussie everyday. Our broker-partnership mentality sets us apart from our competitors, and we work closely with our broker representative groups, Voice of the Broker (VOB) and Aussie Franchise Council (AFC), to develop best practices and improve efficiencies across the network. 

Our unique multichannel distribution model means our brokers’ needs are always met in terms of budget and goals. From our lower cost-of-entry mobile broker model, working as a retail store broker or becoming a franchisee running a scalable business, it’s “your business, your way”.    

Whatever stage brokers enter the business, we have a commission structure and a value proposition to suit. As their businesses scale and become more established, we align our proposition and adjust resources to ensure their success. 

What was Aussie’s biggest achievement in 2021?

2021 was a phenomenal year for Aussie, not only did we achieve a record-breaking financial year of settlements, approvals, and lodgements in June, it was also our best-ever calendar year.

With 228 stores across the country and our network of more than 1,000 brokers, the Aussie network has never been stronger and the merger with Lendi only adds to this momentum

What will be the brokerage’s main points of focus for the next 6 months?

Following our merger with the number one digital platform, Lendi, to form Lendi Group, our focus, is to tailor the Lendi technology platform experience to our Aussie brokers so we can equip our network with the best-in-breed technology and make the customer and broker experience more seamless and effective.

Combining Aussie’s iconic brand, strong distribution model and trusted relationships with proprietary Lendi technology and processes, will ultimately allow us to supercharge growth for our brokers and the Aussie brand.

 What’s your top tip for running a leading brokerage?

Our top tip for running a leading brokerage is to always have your people at the core of what you do. People are at the heart of everything we do, and we firmly believe that following a people-first mindset is the key to success and long-term growth.

We are 100 per cent committed to helping our brokers grow their businesses and strengthen their customer relationships through ongoing training and support initiatives.

03 Mortgage choice &

04 Smartline

Franchise groups Mortgage Choice and Smartline placed third and fourth this year – the final year in which the two will run as separate brands (as they imminently move to consolidate under the Mortgage Choice brand). The chief executive of Mortgage Choice and Smartline, Susan Mitchell, outlines how the two brands have been growing for success

What do you attribute to Mortgage Choice’s success in 2021?

It’s been an incredible year for Mortgage Choice franchisees. We saw total loan settlements grow to more than $13.6 billion in the financial year 2021, and we settled more than 40,000 loans over that same time – an increase of 30 per cent year-on-year.

Joining with REA Group in July 2021 has added to and will accelerate our growth plans, particularly when it comes to reaching the realestate.com.au audience. Throughout 2021 we saw a strong uptick in franchisee recruitment and increased demand for more support staff and loan writers across our established franchises as they managed massive levels of mortgage and home-buyer activity.

We also released several technology enhancements throughout the year to improve broker efficiency and productivity, including the launch of our full digital fact find and the integration of Equifax credit reporting.

One of our success stories in 2021 was launching our second white-label product in February. Mortgage Choice Propel, offered in partnership with Australian Mortgage, has compelling rates and delivers a verified home loan approval in rapid time and creates a better turnaround experience for brokers and their customers.

What do you attribute to Smartline’s success in 2021?

Smartline also had an amazing year, seeing total settlements grow to $7.6 billion across almost 23,000 loans in FY21.

One of Smartline’s biggest success stories was being named as one of topfranchise.com.au’s top five franchise groups in Australia. This award is a great reflection of the passionate and dedicated brokers within the network and their commitment to delivering first-class customer service.

Leveraging its established relationship with REA Group, earlier this year Smartline launched interactive property reports for its brokers and customers using live realestate.com.au supply and demand data. Powered by PropTrack, REA Group’s automatic valuation data business, the property reports are a lead generation and conversion tool, providing prospective home buyers with comprehensive prepurchase information to support their decision. It’s a great example of how the combined network will be able to tap into REA’s digital capabilities.    

What were the 2 brokerages’ biggest achievements in 2021?

A little over 12 months ago we began operating in the new world of best interests duty and we really benefited by being BID-ready from day one across both the Mortgage Choice and Smartline brokerages.

Being BID-ready meant we had automated more of our processes and created a better experience for our customers, as well as more efficient and productive brokerages. Strong links between our compliance and learning and development teams meant better outcomes when training staff and franchisees around BID.

Another major achievement was beginning the journey to bring together the two brokerages under one brand. The acquisition of Mortgage Choice by REA Group was itself a big job, and there’s still a lot to achieve as we join with Smartline, yet both networks have kept their franchises humming and responded to increased mortgage activity and broker demand.

What will be the franchise brokerage’s main points of focus for the next 6 months?

For all the distractions that come with a global pandemic and the merger of two major brokerages, our focus is what it’s always been: helping Australians make better choices with their home loans for a better life.

Some of the most important work we’re doing right now is planning the transition of Smartline franchises to the Mortgage Choice brand and Broker Platform with the least disruption to brokerages and customers. With this transition will come a renewed focus on marketing the brand and our unique proposition to new franchisees and brokers.

You were named CEO of the Year at the Women in Finance Awards in 2021. What are your top tips for running a leading brokerage? 

My approach to leadership focuses on two fundamental beliefs: listening to people and giving people a voice. 

Taking the time to listen provides deep insights into what’s happening across the business at every level.

Giving my office team and our franchisees a voice allows others to take ownership of their role – and to share in the success of Mortgage Choice. Being a leader is not about having all the answers. Rather, I believe it is about encouraging everyone to have a say, and taking inspiration from their ideas. 

05 MoneyQuest

Rounding out the top five is franchise brokerage MoneyQuest, which has been on a growth path recently, snapping up Buyers Choice and releasing new white-label offerings. We catch up with managing director Michael Russell to find out more

What do you attribute to MoneyQuest’s success?

First and foremost, our people, and secondly, our heavy investment in technology. I am blessed to be working alongside a team of people who are not only experts in their fields, but are also incredibly passionate about doing everything they can to support the growth of our franchise owners’ businesses. To add to this, our client communications technology is best in class and is now delivering repeat and referral business well beyond industry expectations.

For new brokers looking to join the industry or existing brokers looking for a fresh start, our people and our technology are compelling reasons to join MoneyQuest. 

What was MoneyQuest’s biggest achievement in 2021?

Celebrating 12 successful months of our bespoke, fully automated, client communications system. July 2021 marked one year since launching our “Customer Journeys” fintech platform, which concentrates on enhancing the client experience from settlement onwards, for the entire life cycle of the loan.

The system is founded on the premise that approximately 75 per cent of a client’s potential lifetime value remains largely untapped after their first loan settles. It is therefore designed to capture this potential lifetime value and increase the likelihood of repeat and referral business conversions, through the distribution of consistent, customised digital communications, which we refer to as “Customer Journeys”.

We were thrilled to celebrate the success of our unique fintech platform one year post-roll-out. At the 12-month mark, it had more than proven its worth, with thousands of clients responding to the automated emails each month, highlighting the technology’s capacity to trigger repeat business opportunities and facilitate client retention.

What will be the franchise brokerage’s main points of focus for the next 6 months?

Our primary focus will be continuing to leverage the strong market conditions to support the organic growth within our franchise businesses. Our secondary focus will be to roll out the new products within our MoneyQuest Home Loans brand including our Alt Doc Construction Loan.

 What’s your top tip for running a leading brokerage?

While it goes without saying that technology can be game-changing, people and culture are the real growth drivers of performance, productivity and profit. 

06 Shore Financial

*Top-rated non-franchise brokerage

In sixth place, and the top-rated non-franchise brokerage, is Shore Financial. Theo Chambers, the chief executive of the North Sydney-based brokerage outlines the keys to his success

 What do you attribute to Shore Financial’s success?

There have been several major projects and initiatives our management team has been working on the past few years, which have all finally come together and proving to be an integral part of our success in 2021. The major projects in particular have been launching our new own Shore Private Home Loan product with a 15-minute formal approval, developing our digital strategy online for lead gen that involved launching a new website and rebrand, further developing our centralised processing team to minimise brokers’ involvement in back-office work and most importantly improving our training, support and resources for our new brokers who come onboard into our induction program. These combined projects coming to fruition led to an increase in broker productivity and efficiency, resulting in 47 per cent growth YoY in loan settlement volume.

The Shore Private product has proven to become extremely popular, more than we had anticipated and it also saves our team a lot of time in processing, allowing refinances to go through in four to five business days. We use the product to advertise online via our digital strategy, creating direct inbound inquiry that our centralised team manages, hence the combination of projects all coming to fruition to create such a successful year.

What was Shore Financial’s biggest achievement in 2021?

Our biggest achievement in 2021 was launching our new office. Unlike our major competitors being the franchise groups, we’ve always had a focus of keeping the team together in one main office to maintain the one team, one dream culture. Culture has always been key for us, so we decided amid COVID and contrary to most businesses’ mentality to search for a bigger and better office space that we could custom design from scratch ourselves for a unique, new-age purpose-built fit-out specialised for both our clients and staff. This includes several collaborative workspaces or private rooms for brokers to either work privately with colleagues or undistracted on their own, a generously sized breakout space with countless amenities encouraging staff to socialise and take a break internally with their fellow team members, a podcast studio for broadcasting content and videoconferencing, as well as a front-of-house entertaining event space for educational client seminars.

We’re a finance business by definition but more of a “people business” by nature, and having a new-age, cooperative workspace where there are various areas within the office allowing the team to socialise and share ideas helps create a collaborative culture, which is the backbone of our business.

What will be the brokerage’s main points of focus for the next 6 months?

Further developing our Shore Private white-label product and expanding our digitised loan process will be the main focus for the next six months. We’re wanting to shift more of our client interaction to be cloud based and online, so that information the client provides is being utilised for our digital strategy and marketing, whilst also slipstreaming the process and minimising the data entry both for our brokers and processing team. This requires our various systems to communicate via an API more effectively that has been our challenge in the past, but thanks to some technological breakthroughs in 2021, we’re able to have all of our various systems feeding information both ways that is a huge change. The subsequent goal with the white-label product is to then take the whole application process online directly from the consumer, so the broker only needs to manage the process and offer the product in the first instance.

Our actual product offering in Shore Private is also what we need to expand, catering to more of the overall market whilst also vertically integrating and hopefully obtaining better funding terms by bringing more of the approval process and loan management in-house.

What’s your top tip for running a leading brokerage?

I always say the same thing, because it doesn’t change: having a brand ethos and business culture that sets you apart from others is key. Figuring out what exactly that even is would be step one.

We’ve always felt that we want to try and create the kind of workplace and company culture that attract great talent. If you hire brilliant people, they will make work feel more like play.

You can see the full Top 25 Brokerages 2022 ranking here - or in the February 2022 edition of The Adviser magazine.

[Related: Top 25 Brokerages 2022]