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Asset finance broker Matthew Klein has set his sights on bigger and more interesting commercial asset finance deals in future after his first six months running his own deals as a broker contractor.
Klein, who brokers loans as part of the Pure Capital team and has been in the industry five years, specialises in “hunting” and writing business asset finance deals in the Sydney market.
Pure Capital itself caters for different types of both commercial and consumer lending deals.
Klein told Australian Broker that, looking at the calendar year 2025, he is focused on fundamentals like maintaining and growing his referral partners and network and obtaining new income streams.
“I’m just riding out this wave at the moment and getting a bit of tenure and letting things kind of happen and learning from those as well,” Klein said.
However, looking ahead towards the future of his career in the industry, he is already sure that he wants to work on bigger and more complex commercial asset finance deals for larger clients.
“Larger, complex commercial deals is where I want to be. It's all about deal numbers and deal sizes and weird and wacky assets, the kind of thing that really gets the blood flowing in a broker.”
Klein said it is not the income but the challenge of getting a deal done that he finds exciting.
“There are assets out there that would be a dream to finance,” he said.
“There's huge mining dump trucks, massive drills, crushers, you know there's massive excavators, just all that earth moving equipment. The huge trucks are insane,” he said.
“I think somebody finances freight trains, military equipment. There's so many cool assets out there and I want to say I was the one that put that together, facilitated that deal and got that moving.”
Klein likes business asset finance deals because he prefers dealing with a client base that operates by the logic of return on investment rather than emotions when it comes to financing decisions.
Klein also receives regular, repeat business from his business clients once he has done one loan.
“You might have a company with a large fleet of vehicles and excavators. They’re constantly needing something, whether it's a little machine, a bit of cash flow, a big machine, a small truck.
“Once you do the first one, you know the client back to front, they might just message you and say, ‘Hey, I need a forklift approved by Tuesday, picking it up Thursday’. Then it’s bang, done and done.”
However, the end of the last financial year was slower than previous years, he said, with fewer businesses investing in assets due to the instant asset tax write-off amount available at the time.
Instead, he said a wave of business flowed through in August and September 2024, as businesses waited to see where they were with their figures after tax time before they started to invest.
The year also included some client education, he said, as higher interest rates caused some clients to hold off committing, despite the potential return on investment they could be sacrificing.
Klein said it was a good opportunity for him as a broker to begin getting more in front of clients.
“It gave me an opportunity to actually stand out and build a bit of rapport, rather than just doing data collection, submitting a deal, settling and saying, ‘see you on the next one’,” he said.
Though early in the year to make predictions, Klein said he is seeing signs that 2025 could be a year of change as finance clients “ramp up” and invest in businesses or change direction altogether.
Klein said he was seeing a lot of business owners who had been in business a long time wanting to start or do new things, or PAYG employees making the jump into their own businesses.
“I dealt with somebody the other day that had been a spray painter for about 10 years, and he wanted to buy a truck and start doing just logistics and construction,” Klein said.
“That’s just one story – there are 20 more stories like that. There's a lot of people I’m seeing that are starting to change, who want to invest their time in other things,” he said.
