A start-up consulting and training company is aiming to supercharge broker loan writing capacities and customer experiences through better admin staff training, business processes and tech tools.
Broker Performance Partners, recently launched by partners Varant Bomoushakian (pictured above left) and Amanda O’Hara (pictured above right), will focus on helping broker business scale and grow through operations transformation.
The firm has begun by announcing a suite of online training resources and courses for broker businesses that need to train up onshore or offshore administration staff as they grow their businesses.
These include single modules and combined longer courses that cover all aspects of broker business administration, including loan processing, loan packaging, credit training and broker support.
This will be followed by the roll out of a consultancy service to help brokers improve their end-to-end business processes to improve operations, free up broker time and improve performance.
This part of the offering will include hands-on consulting and the roll out of process workflows and technology that integrate with aggregator software and streamline broker business management.
Bomoushakian, a former operations leader of Fundii and founder of businesses including training company Upskilled, said the new business would solve common problems faced by many brokers.
“The common statement we’ve been hearing when talking to brokers in the market is that brokers feel they have the capacity to write more loans – but as a business they are just tapped out,” Said Bomoushakian.
Bomoushakian said this was a problem often faced by single broker businesses, who may be writing $6 million to $7 million a month and have a small team, but find the business was very heavily dependent on them.
These brokers businesses also faced the challenge of hiring, training up and holding on to the right administration staff – whether offshore or onshore – to support scaling their business growth.
“They are struggling to find talented staff,” Bomoushakian said. “They might be hiring at almost a broker level, people who after six to 12 months often bounce off and become a broker themselves or join a bigger business.”
O’Hara, who heads up the training side of the business and has 23 years’ industry experience, said some brokers struggled to find the time to train up new administration staff while running a business.
She said brokers also often had inconsistent processes and a combination of technologies that did not support cohesive and efficient process management, especially in hybrid or remote environments.
The offering from Broker Performance Partners is the development and “productisation” of work done for a real broker business with a single broker and 16 staff, including 10 offshore processors.
The training and business process improvement and technology implemented for that broker was able to improve loan writing capacity in the business significantly from $150 million to $700 million.
O’Hara said she hoped every broker would have the opportunity to access the service in future to increase approval rates, reduce applications times and improve their customer experiences.
“We believe this will allow brokers to deliver better customer experiences,” O’Hara said.
“The reason why customers go to a broker is to get a better experience than at a bank – the better that experience is, the more chance there is for brokers to get that repeat business – and this will help create a better experiences for everyone, including brokers, staff and customers.”
