Q. What improvements would make broking better?

Digital signatures to be accepted nationally

In Western Australia, we still do wet sign mortgages, which is an absolute pain in the bum. There’s some who do half and half (like Westpac, who do some digital, some wet sign), but everyone needs to just do digital mortgages and digital loan documents. They just need to scrap anything that’s wet-signed. It’s too annoying.

Also, it is nice when you have onshore credit assessors; I find that that makes a huge difference. For example, Macquarie’s credit assessors versus some of the other banks … with Macquarie, you know it’s going to get assessed immediately, and they’re going to call you and use a common-sense rationale. So, it’s going to get approved straight away (mostly!). So, using more onshore credit assessors for the banks, that’s actually quite a big one.

Nothing to complain about

I don’t have any bugbears … maybe I see life in a very positive way!

I think there has been no better, or easier, time for people to start broking than now. When I first started in finance, I used to have a physical, printed policy document. And if I needed to know what policy was, I had to go through and find it manually. But now, you literally click a button, and policy is right there! You can use borrowing capacity calculators by just entering all the data in one place, and it spits it out like for 30 different banks! You just click a button, and two minutes later, you can deliver a comprehensive and compliant submission to the bank. So, I don’t think there should be any bugbears. The only way for it to be easier is if someone can replicate me! That would be great.

Raising education standards

I think a bit more education in the industry would be good. I’m not averse to people going back to university for education requirements, like the financial planning industry did, to weed out part-time brokers. You can make really good money doing this job, if you’re good at it. But there’s a lot of people who come in and just do what they have to do to make money. I think I would make it tougher to get into the industry.

Better AML/CTF technology

I think if there was something to make the AML/CTF process a little bit easier and be able to stand up to scrutiny when it comes to avoiding fraud, I think it would be a positive.

In the UK, the lenders do their due diligence to ensure pay documents and employment documents are genuine. Whereas here, it’s just a payslip and – in reality – anyone with a computer could have generated that payslip, which is fraught with danger.

I think the only way that you’re going to be able to do that is either directly asking employers to verify or provide a reference of some kind.