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Jayden: [00:00:13] Welcome to Australian Broker TV. My name is Jayden Fennell and I'm the news editor for Australian Broker. Joining me today is Damian Brander, managing director of the Australian Lending and Investment Centre. The AILC has been recognised as 2022 five star mortgage innovator, which showcases the companies at the forefront of innovation within the industry. Congratulations, Damian, on this exceptional achievement and it's great to talk with you today. 

Damian: [00:00:40] Hi, Jayden. Thanks so much for having us on board. We're extremely delighted to have been awarded this recognition. Needless to say, it's something that we've worked really hard for and we're delighted to have been selected. 

Jayden: [00:00:53] That's great to you. Damian my first question is what is the background of the Australian Lending and Investment Centre? 

Damian: [00:01:00] So our background is we're traditionally a mortgage broker in business. We were founded in 2009 by two founding principal owners, Mark Davis and Kevin Agent. Over that period of time, they had a long, illustrious career establishing a lending investment team at AILC to fulfil the Premier needs of some of their clients. They took that skill set and started to apply that for themselves and and hence we created the Australian Lending Investment Centre to help educate our clients in the ways of managing their investment strategies, particularly around wealth creation and enablement through lending scenarios. 

Jayden: [00:01:40] So, Damian, why has the AILC decided to transition from paper to digital? 

Damian: [00:01:45] Well, we really needed to date and it was not a matter of wanting to, was a matter of necessity. We were a very manual based business. From our early inception. We adopted a lot of the traditional bank facilities and processes. Needless to say, during the pandemic that was no longer going to be able to help us manage our business. So we effectively had to digitise our whole process. We took a lot of time to really review and look at each and every process map that existed in the business to remove the manual and cumbersome paper process that existed. We effectively digitized our whole back office operation both here in Australia and in Manila, and then we were able to accelerate and scale up our manila operations to provide a lot more efficiency that allowed us to adapt even faster and quicker. 

Jayden: [00:02:41] So can you tell me about your recent partnership with Wealth and Parlay? 

Damian: [00:02:45] Yeah. So we've been able to fortunately develop and commit to a long term sustainable partnership with wealth and their partnership with Parlay. We're extremely excited as an organization to now proudly say that with every loan that we originate through wealth and in conjunction with parlay 50 square metres of beach or oceanfront around Australia and the globe is clean up because of your loan. So you know, we're developing a new slogan here at AILC because we are extremely excited about this. We're saving the oceans one loan at a time. 

Jayden: [00:03:22] So Damian The AILC had a very strong year in 2021, signing $1 billion worth of loans. What contributed to the success? 

Damian: [00:03:30] Yeah, ultimately I think it was a lot of the innovation that we put into the business. We became a lot more efficient. We became a lot more effective with our resources that we had. Ultimately, there was an uplift in the market. We all know that. But in order to capture that momentum and convert those opportunities, you need to be able to do more with what you have. Essentially, our digital program allowed us to capture more of those opportunities, and we were able to capitalize on our offshore model. We were able to capitalize on our onshore FTA. We were essentially a lot more effective and efficient in the way we managed our client experience. 

Jayden: [00:04:12] And Damian, my final question is, what does the AILC have in store for the future? 

Damian: [00:04:17] We've got a lot in store. Jayden, to be fair, I think we really just started the the journey when it came to digital adoption and digitizing our operation. There's a lot more that we have to still work on. We've got some really exciting initiatives about how we're going to digitize more of our user experience at the front end with things like digital forms that allow us to capture their information before meetings with customers. We're looking at how we might design our own customer interface, that we overlay our CRM system that will allow us to to clinically understand our clients past, present and future all in one three dimensional snapshot. So we've got a lot of work that we can put into the year ahead, and I'm super excited about what that looks like. 

Jayden: [00:05:06] Thank you for your time today, Damian, and thank you to our viewers for watching the latest edition of Australian Broker TV. 

Damian: [00:05:12] Thank you, Jayden. And thank you again to Australian Broker. It's exciting to be awarded this and we're extremely grateful. Thank you.