Mortgage franchise Yellow Brick Road will roll out a cross-lender learning and development platform to boost broker productivity and attract new member brokers.
The platform has been developed over the company’s franchises so far and will be introduced to member brokers at the firm’s aggregator Vow Financial at some point before the end of the year.
“There hasn’t been enough training around how to run your own business,” YBR executive chairman
Mark Bouris told
Australian Broker. “What we’re building to scale is a learning platform that is more centred around how you run your business as opposed to one segment of how you run your business.”
Compliance is merely one aspect of managing a broker business, he said, with YBR’s platform designed to focus on other areas such as lead generation and management, industry best practices, marketing tips and techniques, using social media, and the suitability of lenders for different borrower types.
The platform itself will include scalable discussion forums for brokers, as well as the usual electronic educational methodologies such as webinars.
“The learning platform is not just about making people better lending citizens. It’s about getting better outcomes for consumers by empowering the brokers as to how to run a business,” Bouris said.
The repetitious and readily available nature of the platform is its strong suite, he added, with brokers able to access the material at any time. Furthermore, the educational material will “apply science to the business” and will cover all 34 residential lenders and 16 commercial lenders on the Vow panel.
While the platform will initially only be open to Vow brokers, Bouris said he would consider opening it up to all brokers at some point in the future. He hoped the system would attract new brokers to Vow especially in light of the other aggregator competition out there.
YBR’s objective in focusing on learning and development is to be a leader in the field and inspire others to follow suit, he said.
“We, as an industry, can’t sit back and be told what to do. We have to get up and do it before someone tells us what to do. It’s better to actually get on the front foot and do it now, bite the bullet, and do it well and properly, accurately and completely then it is to be prescribed to us by somebody else.”
YBR has been developing this learning and development initiative for a year and a half with rapid change in the financial system acting as a catalyst.
“You don’t have to be Einstein to work out what’s going to happen. We knew what was going to happen in our industry,” he said. “My part of the business is to predict when things are going to happen and make sure we’re there when they do. That’s what we try and do. I don’t always get it right but this is one we predicted a long time ago.”
The firm has spent $40m over the past six or seven years trying to determine how a mortgage broker can run a more efficient business, he said.
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