Recently crowned Australia’s Major Independent Brokerage of the Year at the Australian Broking Awards 2025, Smartmove has cemented its place as one of the country’s leading brokerages. We caught up with its general manager of lending, Darren Little, to learn how the business has grown
Q. What sort of work have you been doing at Smartmove?
My title is general manager, so it’s very much focused on day-to-day operations. I like to call myself the janitor, because it’s about cleaning up everything.
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David Brell [Smartmove’s founder] was in a situation where all roads led to his office. There was an opportunity to come into the business, be a part of it and leverage things like the bank relationships and the initiatives the team had already started…
It was running that day-to-day scale process, setting the business up in a way that was sustainable so it didn’t all come back to one person – that one key man risk.
Q. What does the scale of the business look like now?
As the lending division of the Viridian Financial Group (Viridian acquired Smartmove in 2023), we are now at around 100 staff members across three countries, with just under 40 brokers in Australia.
Pretty much all of our team in Australia are revenue writers. We also have support teams and operational facilities in Manila in the Philippines and Kathmandu in Nepal. Their roles are to process loans and support our team, and they’re amazing at it. Incorporating, rather than outsourcing, was very much about controlling the culture. That’s been a really big thing.
Last year, we did around 2,600 lodgments to the bank. That’s been pretty consistent. This year, we’re on track to do over 3,000 loan applications with the Smartmove brand.
In addition to that, we process for another amazing business we’ve got an equity position in. So, that’s another 1,000 applications – probably closer to 1,500 – as well.
Q. Smartmove integrated into Viridian Financial Group in 2023. How and why did this come about?
Glenn Coulter, one of Viridian’s joint CEOs, and myself met at a networking function. It really went from talking about two very aligned, client-centric businesses and both wanting to look at innovation and grow scale. We both had very similar philosophies.
It became apparent very quickly that while we could create a referral relationship that could have created some opportunities, we were genuine about wanting to do something different.
We saw the value in a whole, diversified financial services business, which we are now. We were probably one of the first bigger brokerages to merge with a larger financial group.
We’re now two years into that journey and are the lending service of that group.
Q. What does it take to run a major brokerage?
Generally, a broker has got into the business because they’re passionate about some aspect of it. They’ve been successful and they’ve got it to a stage where they have one or two or three brokers and some support staff. But then where does that passion go? Are they passionate about running a business or are they passionate about helping clients?
That’s probably one of the things I’d really encourage people to understand: where their passion is. If you’re passionate about it, you’re not really working. You’re just enjoying what you do.
Q. What’s your approach to bringing new brokers in?
We had a pretty good track record of bringing new-to-industry brokers into the business and now we’ve built out a broker training academy, which is a 26-week purpose-built Smartmove training program.
Everything that we had ad hoc in the business, we condensed. One of our senior brokers, Cameron Wiles, took that on and he has done an amazing job.
We’ve put around 20 brokers through that academy – it’s a fully paid 26 weeks of training. You get exposure to what we call the Smartmove way, how we deal and interact with customers. A new broker comes into our business and has the ability to sit with some of the best brokers in the industry and see a lot of files. They also spend time in our operations centre in the Phillipines, understanding what gets done for them and how that interaction works.
It’s been a very big part of that next stage of our development.
Q. What advice would you share with brokers who are trying to grow their business?
For me, it’s about having an amazing team who are aligned and having a really strong, consistent process that you can scale.
There’s no point in having five amazing brokers if they’re doing five different things – it’s about getting that unified approach.
Tune in to hear more! Find out more about what it takes to run a major brokerage in the Elite Broker podcast episode, ‘Building Australia’s Major Independent Brokerage of the Year’. You can watch the episode on YouTube above, or on your device by clicking here. You can also listen to the audio-only version via your podcast player of choice or in the embedded player below:
