Energy Lend’s Darren Sayers: Adapt or die

Energy Lend at a glance

• Owner: Darren Sayers (pictured, above)

• Location: Croydon South, Victoria

• Services offered: Home loans, asset finance, commercial mortgages, business loans, personal loans

• Number of employees: Five (including Sayers)

Darren Sayers’ career as a broker goes all the way back to 2002. The director of Victoria-based brokerage Energy Lend was working in IT at the time, where his job involved working with creative businesses to implement digital technologies into their workflows.

Despite being a gifted developer, Sayers desperately wanted a change of career; mortgage broking just so happened to be waiting in the wings.

“I met a mortgage broker who was kind enough to tell me all about how the industry worked,” recalls Sayers. “It seemed like such a good fit for me. I liked the idea of providing finance solutions to clients, plus the nature of remuneration would allow me to reinvest in my processes and hopefully continue to improve service levels and ultimately grow my business.”

Sayers went to work on building both his client base and services offering, with a view to providing more than just mortgage advice.

He tells MPA: “I referred to myself as a finance broker, rather than a mortgage broker, because I wanted to service business customers and other borrowers who had broader needs, including asset finance, commercial mortgages, cash flow lending, home loans, personal loans, etc.”

There was, however, one major roadblock to his professional growth. While there was a smattering of broker-centric CRM options on the market, Sayers couldn’t find anything that was a true fit for his business, or complete enough to reduce the need for other systems.

“When I started as a finance broker I was surprised there weren’t already systems available to help me run my business and manage loan applications,” he says. “These were the days of paper-based forms and faxing applications.”

If only he knew someone with a background in IT...

Keeping it simple

Sayers developed a bespoke CRM that in his words was “simple” yet “worked well enough at the time”.

In fairness, being a mortgage broker was also relatively simple in the mid-2000s. Things have undeniably changed.

“Much of how brokers operate today is greatly improved on past practices,” says Sayers. “Changes included the introduction of credit licensing, further enhancements to compliance requirements (not least the best interests duty), increased work required by the broker and overall greater complexity. We had to navigate this with greater efficiency because we also endured reduced commissions.”

Broker-on-broker competition also ratcheted up as the millennium rolled on. A steadily increasing share of the mortgage market brought more players to the scene, making the customer experience more important than ever.

Read more: What's the purpose of Australia's broker associations?

Come 2019, Sayers felt like he needed to make some big changes to how he operated. Enter a rebranding of his brokerage to Energy Lend and a completely overhauled business platform by the name of Orbit Pro.

“Orbit Pro has become a key part of our success because it addresses all aspects of a broker business,” says Sayers. This includes structured deal workflows, automated reconciliation, loan reviews, compliance and even marketing.

In 2021, Energy Lend partnered with nMB to fully integrate Orbit Pro with the aggregator’s system to facilitate home loan lodgements directly to ApplyOnline.

More than just something nice to have, this became “one of the biggest steps forward for our business”, says Sayers. “Not only did it allow us to generate our own compliance documents and control our own workflow; it opened up the possibility of integrating with other systems where we could see benefit.”

Sayers describes the design of Orbit Pro as “deliberately simple”. In other words, it follows basic design principles “so a user can pick it up quickly and only require basic training to get started”.

Further developments are expected in mid-2026.

Going deeper

Sayers speaks passionately of the tech-savvy way he has navigated his brokerage through significant industry upheaval.

Tangential to that is Energy Lend’s referrer program, which is mostly targeted at accountants. To do this, the brokerage implemented a web portal, which communicates loan updates but, most importantly, provides key information for the tax work the accountants would need to do for their clients.

“I like to think of Energy Lend as a modern iteration of a finance broking business,” says Sayers. “We take a team-based approach with our clients so we can continue to diversify while remaining experts in all that we do.”

This team-based approach contrasts with the traditional one-to-one client relationship that Sayers believes is “limiting because a single person can’t be an expert in all types of finance any more”.

Clients also vary: some need a more sophisticated level of service, while others just need a simple solution, he explains.

Beyond the IT window dressing and unique client models, the key lesson to be gleaned from this brief retrospective of Energy Lend is: adapt or die. That could involve writing your own software or figuring out how to best structure your team, all the while keeping the customer experience front of mind.

As Sayers says: “Embracing change and finding new ways to create efficiency is critical to growing or at least maintaining our market share.”

A family matter

Part of Energy Lend’s evolution involved bringing in director Darren Sayer’s son Benjamin (pictured, below) to run the asset finance business. At 24 years of age, Benjamin Sayers has already made his mark in the industry, having recently participated on stage as a panel member in the FBAA’s Commercial and Asset Finance Masterclass in Melbourne. He became an Energy Lend director in 2024.

“I liked the idea of providing finance solutions to clients, plus the nature of remuneration would allow me to reinvest in my processes and hopefully continue to improve service levels and ultimately grow my business,” he says.