The age of the digital broker: Leveraging tech to drive efficiency

Broker Daily recently attended the Loan Market Scale Up conference 2024 in Adelaide. Over 800 brokers came together to learn about the innovations benefiting the industry.

The digital broker

Speaking to Broker Daily, Loan Market’s chief customer experience officer Jason Furnell noted just how crucial it is for brokers to be open to utilising tech and data, as it helps create a better client experience.

“We want to get away from documents, just pure data,” said Furnell. “There was a time when you had to fill out a paper application form and it was blank. That’s hard. That’s tedious.

“Then there’s been a movement to digitise that process so that the forms are easier to fill out. You have a chance to edit them and have another go at them and it’s clearer what you’re meant to fill out.

“Starting with a blank page is really hard. We’ll get to the point where we’ll be able to do a majority of that data collection work and then the brokers can really just focus on high quality conversations, advice, things like that. That path of integrating more data providers and improving efficiencies for the brokers in the end just makes a better experience for the clients.”

Further speaking to the opportunities of tech, especially AI, was Loan Market’s chief strategy and risk officer David McQueen.

“We’re often asked the question, should brokers be scared or avoid AI? The reality is, it’s like saying, should you avoid the internet?” said McQueen.

“You’ve got to embrace and self-disrupt as opposed to let yourself be disrupted. So, I don’t think it’s never a case of avoiding technologies, it’s actually a case of how do we leverage these in effective ways, but also be educated in terms of the risks that are associated with them.”

AI can help streamline processes for brokers and allow for more quality hands-on time with clients.

“If I look at the emergence of things like ChatGPT, they’re brilliant tools, right? Brokers have the opportunity to use them as an example to support writing best interest duty notes, they can write even more comprehensive notes than previously,” said McQueen.

However, Furnell said that this tech isn’t there to do client-facing work. It’s simply an assistant for getting the repetitive and mundane tasks organised so brokers can give more attention to clients.

“The face-to-face and chatting bit is the bit that we don’t want to change. We want connection and we want our brokers to deliver high-quality advice to people on what their options are and guidance on how to make it easy. I think the bit that we’re trying to remove is the boring, tedious stuff,” said Furnell.

“It enhances. So having a digitally enabled broker … is largely just about understanding what the opportunities are for the client. Considering their financials, considering their employment, considering their assets. All that collecting the finances and analysing it is not a high-value conversation. We could spend the next 45 minutes and I could ask you really boring questions, like, where do you live? Where did you live previously? What did you do? It’s like an interrogation. So, we want to get away from those sorts of conversations and get more to, what do you want to achieve? What do your goals look like? How comfortable would you be with different things?

“It’s very focused on the goals the client has. It could be property, it could be commercial, it could be asset, any of those sort of lending scenarios. We really see an amazing blend of technology and broker engagement that is just a winning combo. So, I honestly don’t see the digitisation of the application process being a threat. It’s a massive opportunity.”

Are brokers hesitant?

As with any change, there may be some resistance. Brokers who have been performing their role the same way for decades may understandably be hesitant to adopt new ways of working. This is where education and training can be beneficial.

“The consumers go through tech every three to five years. But the brokers, they’ve got complex business, staff, training. So, we’re just much more careful about how we release stuff and put a bigger emphasis on training, adoption and advocacy,” Furnell said.

“It always takes time to get the adoption rates up, because it’s a classic adoption curve. You get the early adopters; they’ll engage with it. You’ve got to find stories and success in that, and then you can move on. So, I think our adoption curve is probably not that different to everyone else’s, in the sense that not everyone just turns up on day one and says, yeah, I want to try that new thing. It takes time.”

This is where the aggregators come in. McQueen discussed the role of these organisations in informing brokers on the potential and risks associated with tech adoption.

“The role of an aggregator has to be to support the brokers in knowing the risks associated with those tools, and to coach and educate them on how to use them. As an example, we’ve recently hired like cyber security coach. We’ve trained our compliance coaches and involved them to understand this tech so they can support the brokers in using it,” McQueen said.

“Because the risk is that you go out and you use a tool that isn’t secure, or you’re throwing customer PI data into those tools that puts the customer at risk, and the brokers get into trouble. It’s the whole industry needs to embrace this, because it’s not a Loan Market issue. If something goes wrong, the whole broker industry pays the price, so we genuinely believe the tools are awesome. We should embrace them, we should be leveraging them, but we should be providing guidance and almost frameworks on how to use them.”

Cyber concerns

Speaking further to cyber security, McQueen detailed how it is a tricky area. Any time customer data is dealt with, there are fears about security. Considering the high-profile data breaches that have rocked some of Australia’s largest companies, these fears aren’t unfounded.

“Clients see in the media all the issues associated with cyber, and rightfully so … Part of our role is to ensure that they’re aware that brokers are leveraging and using their data in a trusted way, and that they’re the trusted adviser, and the more that we can give them those guidance and the frameworks to educate their clients as well,” McQueen said.

“I think also the broker can play a role, not just in educating clients that they’re safe, but also helping the client be safe themselves. We’re seeing imposters, as an example, pretending to be conveyancers, and pretending to be builders, and the broker actually making the client aware as they go through that journey of the potential risks will cement the broker’s role even more as a trusted adviser.”

Awareness and education around the risks but also what’s being done to mitigate them are what can help put the client at ease and reduce any anxiety around sharing data. It’s also up to brokers to be across this area to provide a more holistic service.

Furnell said: “Consumers are pretty mature. They’re using a lot of different kinds of technologies. I think it’s interesting that sometimes it’s the brokers who are hard to change than the consumer. Consumer behaviour will shift quite quickly.”

[Related: How AI is shifting the broking industry]

Jack Campbell is the editor of Broker Daily. After graduating from the University of Wollongong in 2022, Jack began his journalistic career working on Broker Daily’s sister brand, HR Leader. In August 2023 he was made the news editor and worked alongside some talented journalists writing articles and recording podcasts.

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