National aggregator FAST has seen a solid year of growth across the board, including expanding its broker network by 249 countrywide.
In New South Wales alone, the aggregator has brought in around 50 brokers, said Rob Ryan, head of FAST for NSW/ACT and Queensland, in a business update at a FAST professional development day in Sydney on Tuesday (28 November).
This brings the aggregator’s total broker network to 1,364, an increase from the 1,124 working with FAST five years ago..
As of the end of October, total settlements in residential, commercial and asset finance have hit $16.7bn with an extra three months to go for the year. This puts the aggregator in good stead to beat the $20.3bn brought in through the entirety of 2016, Ryan said.
“You can see we have slightly plateaued from the previous year and that’s evidenced by things such as the cessation of the foreign investor volumes coming through … and also business commercial and residential construction was capped by a lot of the lenders.”
With a lot of business flowing through to private funders as a result, FAST is looking to bring some of these funders on board, he said.
The aggregator’s total trail book has also grown from $61.6bn in FY16 to $67.1bn in FY17, an annual increase of 9%.
“That just continues to climb and we will continue to see that over the next few years.”
Breaking this down, the $20.2bn in total settlements written in the 12 months to the end of October consisted of $14.7bn in residential lending and $5.5bn in commercial and asset finance.
“That represents around about 35% of the total flows for aggregation so we are still by far the leading commercial and asset finance aggregator in the market as per data collated by Comparator.”
Ryan predicted that commercial lending will continue to rise in the coming year.
