After two months of head to head battles between brokers and industry experts, the Wealthify ping pong tournament has come to an end.
The grand final took place last week in Sydney with the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final game all in one evening.
The winner of a trip to Bali was a BDM from Freedom Insurance, Ian Witteridge. Originally from England, he said the win was a consolation prize after the football team was knocked out of the World Cup that same morning.
The tournament was organised by Wealthify in response to criticism surrounding the broking and finance industry after the Royal Commission.
Wealthify CEO Darren Moffatt said at the time of organising that he “just wanted people to have fun”.
After winning the tournament, Witteridge said, “It was a consolation prize for not winning the World Cup, so buzzing with that, really pleased. You could say the trophy has gone in the trophy cabinet: it’s on the breakfast bench which is where it’ll stay.
“This year is when I started fully with mortgages, so it’s good to network with people at an event that’s not about business.
“There’s definitely been a lot of pressure on the industry. I have always had a bit of an eye on the mortgage industry but I have noticed since the royal commission there’s a bit of worry.
“I’ll give a shout out to Darren, it was well organised and he did really well to do it.”
Moffatt said the organisers were pleased with how the tournament went. With a lot of support from the industry, there were thought to be around 35 individuals taking part, from brokers, lenders and aggregators, with more than 20 organisations involved.
While they are thinking about making it an annual event, Moffatt said they needed to recover from this year’s tournament first.
He added, “It’s been a big hit and the main thing is that it’s really good fun. I thought the level of cheer in the room on Thursday night was quite high and it was a great one for people to let off steam.
“We had a lot of positive feedback from people that were there. We knew networking would happen but we didn’t think it would be that good. It was the mix of people that got together that was quite unique and that was an unintended bonus I guess.
“Through the event we met lots of people that we hadn’t met before but we got to build good relationships with them and likewise they got to build relationships with other people.
“Next year I think there’ll probably be more interest in it and it’ll be more competitive to get in.
“A lot of industry events are ok but there seemed to be a genuine level of excitement with what we were doing and you can’t fake that.
“We got to the end of it and we collapsed! It was a lot of work to put on.”
