Loan Market appoints new head of learning and development

In his new position, Mr Manuel will develop a national curriculum for Loan Market brokers, consolidating content from its marketing, technology and compliance divisions to create a national standard for the group.

Mr Manuel has 20 years of industry experience and has previously been a broker success manager at Loan Market. 

He will now lead the learnings and teaching tools for Loan Market’s broker success managers (BSMs).

The national curriculum will reportedly draw on best practices and tactics of the group’s leading brokerages and utilise Lean Six Sigma and Kaizen productivity principles, which have already been utilised by Loan Market’s head of business improvement, Michael Zavelberg, to help increase productivity and efficiency.

Both Mr Manuel and Mr Zavelberg will work together to incorporate these learnings into the national training program.

Mr Manuel commented: “Kaizen and Lean Six Sigma framework is undoubtedly a game changer for our brokers and their businesses, in a single session we find hours of process improvements that can save our brokers quantifiable time.

“Every Loan Market BSM is training to be a qualified Lean Six Sigma certified yellow-belt, so we can extend Kaizen methodology to help every broker in the network to achieve net productivity gains.” 

He continued: “Equally, I’ll be shining a light on leading small brokerages – including many husband and wife teams – that are leading the way and what systems and procedures they’ve developed to achieve that.

“Through digital education and face-to-face training, I’m looking forward to showing brokers that success comes in many shapes and sizes,” Mr Manuel said.

Loan Market’s executive director of network success, Andrea McNaughton, said establishing a uniform training program across Australia would increase broker productivity at a time when best interests duty (BID) and rising market share was making brokers busier than ever.

“We have a unique opportunity to take the industry’s benchmark for education and learning to a new level in 2021 through collaboration and sharing the practices and insights of the best minds in broking,” she said.

The move to establish a national training curriculum comes as the Loan Market Group looks to expand.

Last year, the group announced that it had entered into an agreement with NAB to acquire 100 per cent of NAB’s aggregation groups: Choice Aggregation Services, FAST and PLAN Australia.

[Related: What the Loan Market/NABregators deal means for brokers]