uno revamps broker offering

The online brokerage – which first launched in 2016 as a “consumer-brokered” mortgage website for borrowers – has been shifting its model to become more broker-oriented in recent years.

While the Westpac-backed platform originally hired in-house credit advisers to support borrowers using the platform to find an appropriate home loan, it turned to external brokers in 2020 to help manage capacity when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in mortgage borrowings.

Following the success of this arrangement, general manager John Sader and chief executive Vincent Turner undertook a review of uno’s broker offering to position it as a true online brokerage that would “power the next generation of Australian mortgage brokers”.

Speaking to The Adviser, founder and CEO Mr Turner said: “To be open about it, I don’t think we had a strong broker proposition. 

“We always thought that customers want to make big, infrequent, high-value and highly emotional decisions with the help of a human who’s informed and has empathy. And that’s the broker.

“What we’ve observed over the last few years – and brokers will probably laugh at this – is that customers like to have continuity in the person who’s helping them with those decisions over time. 

“And so, if we want to build a large sustainable brokerage business, then we also need to make uno a place where people want to build a brokerage business over a long period of time.

“[W]e recognised that we needed to rethink our broker proposition and be really clear on why a broker would want to come to uno and be a broker in partnership with us for a long period of time. If we haven’t got that right, we need to get that right first, and then work out how we support that outcome.

“Because without that outcome, uno won’t be successful long-term brokerage business. So, over the last nine months, we have been creating a broker proposition that is attractive to a certain type of broker who is coming to uno to build a business in partnership for the long term.”

Offering aims to help brokers write 1st loan within 30 days

According to Mr Turner, a large part of this piece focuses on technology and providing brokers – particularly new brokers – with the tools to build their own broker business under the uno brand (for example via digital marketing templates and social content) while harnessing the platform’s technology (such as its mortgage monitoring tool loanScore).

He explained that the COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated mortgage brokers’ use of technology to help them manage their growing workloads and new ways of working, and wanted to build on this appetite for the new uno model.

“We want to power the next generation of Australian mortgage brokers… brokers who are not bound geographically and those who are being born into a remote world and don’t expect just to get customers from the places where they live, but to be able to operate in any of their virtual networks and not be limited to a certain area,” Mr Turner said.

“Brokers are also saying that they need to spend all their time doing referrals, talking to prospects and working on deals. Every minute they spend not doing those three things is slowing their business down. So, a lot of what uno has been building and taking to market is a proposition that says ‘our job is to make sure you spend all your time doing those three things – at least 85 per cent of the time – and we are aiming for technology and people and support to take all the other stuff away from it’.

“The promise of our technology is to enable a broker to come in and not have to go to another system; they should be able to do everything they need to do when they’re prospecting, doing needs analysis and making recommendations, etc. all from one place. And so our investments have been very heavily on that.

“So, we’re giving them the technology that’s designed to enable them to serve customers, wherever they are, very efficiently and be able to operate under an asset (i.e. the uno brand) that’s already being built. They’re using their personal brand plus uno.”

Mr Sader, uno’s general manager (and formerly the state manager NSW/ACT for Westpac’s online lending service Connect Now) added that the platform aims to marry the human element with technology and enable brokers to write loans more quickly. It aims to do this by accelerating the lead generation and brand establishment and reducing the costs of being a new broker.

According to the uno GM, the platform’s new system has been process engineered to enable new brokers (those who already have a Cert IV in mortgage broking and their own insurance) to write their first loan within 30 days after agreeing to become an uno broker.

He explained: “Organisations tend to swing too far left or right when it comes to going digital or being all about the human part of the interaction… some of the lenders are going digital but I think they’ve gone far too digital, it’s very transactional. There’s no real human component and it often ends at the end of settlement. Whereas we thought we needed to maintain the relationship piece, the longevity of the relationship, and use digital to enable brokers to do that to their best ability.”

Mr Turner said that the brokerage aims to have a team of 40 “activated” brokers by the end of the calendar year and continue to build from there.

“We are really mindful not to get ahead of ourselves… I think a lot of what makes this stuff work is being thorough and being detail-oriented and being very rigorous in how you take things out to market,” Mr Turner said.

“We have an obligation to the brokers that come on to absolutely deliver on the promise. And we believe if we do that then, hopefully, a year from now we will get a similar NPS from our brokers as we do from our customers.

“That would be the outcome that would feel like success to me.

“I do believe that if you have a model that allows talent from all over Australia to operate from where they are – effectively and without any friction – then we’re going to help more brokers come into the industry or take the next step in their brokerage career. And I think there’s something noble about that.”

[Related: Uno pilots new broker referral model]