How fintechs think the broker’s role is changing

From open banking and self-employed lending to fraud prevention, client retention, and lender policy, technology is increasingly being positioned as a way to take repetitive tasks off brokers’ desks, allowing them to spend more time where they can add the greatest value.

While each fintech approaches the challenge differently, a common thread emerged during discussions at Broker Daily’s Broker Innovation Summit: the successful broker of the future won’t necessarily do less work, but more impactful work.

We sat down with some of broking’s fintechs to find out how they believe technology is changing the way brokers operate – and where they see things heading next.

Open banking shifts gears

Open banking has long been touted as a way to reduce paperwork, but fintech leaders believe its real impact lies in changing how brokers spend their time.

Speaking at Broker Daily’s Broker Innovation Summit, Alessandro Pinna, head of customer success at NextGen (the summit’s principal partner), said the industry had reached a “tipping point” in open banking adoption.

“More and more brokers are signing up for the service and inviting clients to share their financial data,” Pinna said.

“We’re seeing quite a lot of interest in understanding how brokers can use Open Banking to improve efficiencies in their business. That obviously provides a better customer experience as well. Brokers get access to a broad range of documents, including transaction reports, account statements and summaries that can satisfy lender document requirements much faster.”

NextGen’s open banking solution, powered by Frollo, enables brokers to securely access verified customer financial data as part of the loan application process.

“I’ve seen that brokers are very curious to understand all the different tools that are available to them,” Pinna said.

“The game changer won’t just be the tools themselves, but how they use them to better their business and the service as a whole.”

Chris Keshishian from digital onboarding platform Middle Finance said the technology was also changing the way brokers approached the earliest stages of the client journey.

“The aim of Middle was to alleviate brokers’ time from chasing clients, chasing documents, chasing statements and empowering them to spend more time where their expertise lies. And that’s advising, strategising and writing loans to help people get into their houses,” he said.

Looking ahead, Keshishian said technology should enhance, rather than replace, the relationship between broker and client.

“It’s a very fine line between enabling tech and AI without taking away the personal attribute of a broker–client relationship... where we see AI and tech heading is not replacing the broker or that personal role, but more being a facilitator to enhance the interaction or the conversation they might already have,” Keshishian said.

Opening the door to more complex borrowers and better conversations

Accurateli, which uses AI to analyse self-employed financials and assess borrowing capacity, was developed to simplify one of the industry’s most complex lending scenarios: self-employed borrowers.

Co-founder Joel Wyld said the goal was not simply to speed up the assessment process, but to allow brokers to spend more time delivering value to their clients.

“We basically want to take the self-employed assessment off the table so the broker can focus on having those really high-quality conversations,” Wyld said.

“A lot of brokers will hang their hat on, ’I’m great at self-employed.’ Well, that’s really cool, but your customer doesn’t see that. They see the outcome.”

Wyld said brokers should use the time saved to help clients better understand their finances and long-term goals.

“If you spend three hours doing it yourself or use an app that takes five minutes, the outcome is still the same. But if you spend that three hours walking them through their budget or talking about their goals, helping them buy the home, you become much more valuable to that customer,” Wyld said.

Retention as a strategy

Technology is also changing how brokers think about client retention, shifting the focus from annual reviews to ongoing relationship management.

Stryd provides brokers with loan book monitoring and client engagement tools designed to help identify opportunities to reconnect with customers throughout the life of their loan.

Founder and CEO Ruth Hatherley said too many brokers still viewed retention as a reactive exercise.

“Many brokers will see retention as a reactive activity and they don’t see it as a proactive business-growing opportunity,” Hatherley said.

“Often they’ll put administrative steps or checklist things in place like, ‘We send our customers birthday cards once a year’ or ‘We send them an email to say, let’s do a home loan review.’ But none of that is a value exchange for the customer.”

Instead, she said technology should help brokers identify meaningful opportunities to reconnect with clients.

“What we want to change is the focus on proactive retention. It’s about nurturing that relationship, being the trusted partner with your customer, but also growing and protecting your loan book, which is going to give you more business opportunities,” Hatherley said.

Changing the fight against fraud

As AI-generated documents become increasingly sophisticated, fintech leaders believe technology will play a growing role in helping brokers identify fraud before applications reach lenders.

Brett Spencer, founder of Fraud X, which uses AI to analyse documents for manipulation, said the days of spotting a fraudulent document by eye were rapidly disappearing.

“The documents can be created using AI tools... we’ve seen tax documents, ID documents and payslips that, to me as a credit person, are absolutely real,” Spencer said.

“It’s only when you look at an AI platform that can delve deeper into these things... AI helps on that, but it’s also AI that’s there to find other AI.”

Rather than replacing broker due diligence, Spencer said the technology was becoming another layer of protection as fraud methods evolved.

“You can know right at the pre-submission stage whether documents have been manipulated,” he said.

“You can prove you’ve done everything possible. You’ve done your due diligence.”

Finding the right lender becomes smarter

As lender policies become increasingly complex, AI is also changing the way brokers research products, assess scenarios, and identify suitable lending solutions.

Michael Richardson, founder of lender policy platform Cynario, said the next evolution of AI would help brokers navigate lender policy more effectively rather than simply searching documents.

“It’s really putting a lot of pressure back on lenders in terms of the quality of data they’re actually providing to brokers to determine where to place deals for their clients,” Richardson said.

“Having that AI, especially agentic AI, over the top of it is really opening a lot of doors to lenders that brokers may not have known about and may not have considered.”

Brenton Hartley, broker engagement manager at Quickli, whose platform combines servicing calculators, policy guidance, and workflow automation, said AI was removing much of the manual research involved in preparing applications.

“You can now honestly do an application, get the research and servicing done within a few minutes, which is crazy,” Hartley said.

“I just see more AI and automation coming. But there’s also still that human connection that we need to have.”

For Julian Fayad, founder and CEO of LoanOptions.ai, which develops AI-powered lending technology for brokers, the next challenge lies in making those technologies work together.

“The biggest pain point is, ‘Does this platform connect with my aggregator?’” Fayad said.

“As an industry we do need to get better... we want brokers to have the ability to access those amazing tools that are being built.”

[Related: Is ‘dirty’ data holding broker technology back?]

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