As consolidation reshapes the broking landscape, Blank Financial is backing a different approach to broker growth. In this feature, founder Bernard Desmond explains how the right operational support, strong personal branding, and a relentless focus on keeping brokers client-facing can accelerate growth and help advisers build scalable businesses.
If the broking industry is a football tournament, 2026 marks the transition to the knockout stage.
While broker market share remains at a record high, the landscape is shifting.
As major banks continue to prioritise proprietary channels, competition is expected to intensify, raising the prospect that consolidation will define the industry’s next phase.
The question isn’t so much how the star players survive but how emerging brokers and ambitious solo operators get ahead.
Bernard Desmond, a multi-award-winning broker and founder of Blank Financial, has developed a pathway aimed at addressing this fundamental challenge.
The Victorian brokerage offers a licensing model centred on a structured, service-led platform, where brokers can plug into established operational, credit, and processing infrastructure.
As Desmond says, the result can be a faster path to volume.
“It’s about helping solo brokers find a better home where they’re wearing all the various hats that you need to wear to become a successful solo broker,” he says.
“We’re providing them with an established and recognised brand. We’re providing them with the entire end-to-end support, which includes loan processing, credit assessment, marketing, one-on-one coaching, and mentoring to help them scale up their businesses. We’re also providing new opportunities. For instance, we’ve got partnerships with large real estate groups.
“It’s taking away all of the admin and credit functions from the broker, so they can focus purely on relationships – get in front of more people, talk to more people, hold all the relationships with them, and we’ll do all of the back end that is required to settle the loan.”
Prospecting, not processing
One of the reasons Desmond introduced Blank Financial’s model was to address the need to balance prospecting for new business with processing existing clients.
As he says, many brokers struggle to secure enough opportunities to meet new borrowers.
This challenge is especially pronounced for those new to the industry.
“The lending rules are constantly changing. There’s no point mastering the lending rules today if they’re just going to change tomorrow,” Desmond says.
“What you have to master as a mortgage broker is how you can get in front of more people who have a need to use your service.”
Blank Financial’s licensing model offers a range of back-end support that can help brokers reduce their operational burdens.
This support is divided into three core functions – loan processing, credit, and settlements – with additional assistance available in areas such as marketing.
As Desmond says, the model seeks to support both new-to-industry brokers but also established brokers who already excel at the relationship side of the business.
“We’re in the business of prospecting loans, not processing loans. A lot of brokers get lost in processing. It should be the other way around. They should be prospecting loans,” he says.
“There are many services you can use to process a loan, but the brokers who master the craft of prospecting relationships, opportunities and new business will be more successful. There’s no point knowing the best policy if you don’t have opportunities to service those customers.”
And it’s this support that affords brokers capacity to scale.
“If you’re a solo broker with no support, realistically you can’t scale beyond $24 million to $25 million a year, especially if you’ve been a solo broker for a number of years,” he says.
“You don’t just have new customers, you also have to look after your back book, because the money that you earn today is not yours for 24 months. If you don’t nurture those customers and keep them engaged, and speak to them and be front of mind, you might get more clawbacks than business. It is so important for brokers to keep engaged with their clients, do quarterly reviews, do community events, give back, because that’s when you’re going to be front of mind.
“The traditional broker model, where it is one-man band, you do it alone – that broker might not be speaking to the customer for years. And that’s where you get leakages.”
The ceiling facing solo brokers
One of the key factors that inspired Desmond to launch the model was a desire to create the type of support network he wished had existed when he first entered the industry.
He says hands-on operational support is one of the key points of difference between his offering and what is typically available through traditional aggregation groups.
“They’re not helping you build your business. They’re not helping you do the loan processing. They’re not helping you do the credit assessment. They’re not creating content that’s going to be relatable in today’s market, that’s going to get you cut through,” he says.
“Everything that I was missing I have just packaged and made available, and our target market is customers who are established brokers and new-to-industry brokers who are really good at relationships. We can teach them, and we can put all our resources behind them.”
As the industry consolidates, competition intensifies, and scale becomes increasingly important, brokers will have plenty of work to do to stand out from the crowd.
Looking ahead, Desmond expects consolidation to accelerate as larger groups with greater resources increasingly gain a competitive edge over smaller operators.
However, he says there is a significant opportunity for brokers who can get it right.
“You don’t have to explain to the customer what you can do for them. I think that has certainly changed in the last 10 years. Customers are time-poor these days. They need choice. They need someone in the corner that they can trust,” he says.
“They don’t want to be known just as a name and a number with the banks, they want to be on, be able to build relationships, and trust someone when they’re buying the biggest asset.
“For a lot of customers, they’re probably only going to do that once or twice in their lifetimes.”
For that reason, he encourages new brokers to focus on broader, strategic work.
“Prospect. Prospecting is like oxygen to mortgage brokers. If you stop prospecting, you’re going to run out of business. Also, outsource everything that doesn’t give you good energy,” he says.
“Most brokers don’t get good energy from processing loans or being on hold to the banks.
“You did not become a broker to do all of this. You became a broker to create relationships.”
