What does it take to drive success at a top non-bank?

Bennett Richardson  00:00:00 

Hello everyone, and welcome to this Australian Broker TV Leader Profile where we're featuring non-bank Brighton. Today, we'll be hearing all about Brighton's blueprint for innovation strategy, where rapid growth is driven by technology and broker centric solutions. We're privileged to have Jason Azzopardi, Chief Executive of Brighton with us to share insights into the company's approach. He's based in Sydney. Welcome, Jason.  

Jason Azzopardi  00:00:22 

Thanks. Bennett, thanks for having me. 

Bennett Richardson  00:00:25 

To kick off I'm going to ask Jason to give us some background about the rapid rise of Brighton and how it's making waves in the lending sector. So, Brighton has experienced rapid growth in recent years. Jason, can you walk us through the key elements of Brighton's innovation strategy that have contributed to the success? 

Jason Azzopardi  00:00:42 

Yeah, sure, I'd love to. So, we're very, very focused on products, I think Brighton's differentiation is we have a product for all Australians, whether you are an expat living overseas, whether you are building your dream home, or whether you're a normal salary and wage earner or self employed person, we have a product for you. We further expanded that recently, we've gone into the Commercial sector, where we're now allowing people who want to buy factories for their businesses or various other commercial properties, we've expanded there with four different products. We've also offered a vacant land product to the Australian mortgage market, and that's for people who are looking to build a house and land package but haven't actually decided yet on who they're going to build with the type of home they want to build. They can buy that block of land safe, knowing they have the time to get their architects and their designs in place and build that dream home. We've been fortunate enough to increase the number of brokers who are accredited with Brighton. The broker network in Australia is absolutely crucial to Brighton. They originate over 75% of Home Loans today and our business is very, very focused on ensuring that we can provide brokers the right product and service for their customers. We've increased the number of accredited brokers by two and a half 1000 during the year and we also recently joined the Mortgage Choice Aggregator Panel, which has given all of those mortgage choice brokers the opportunity to access Brighton's products. 

Bennett Richardson  00:02:12 

Great, thanks, Jason, and how is Brighton leveraging technology to streamline processes, enhance service delivery and ultimately support broker partners more effectively?  

Jason Azzopardi  00:02:22 

Think the key, initiatially, that we recently brought in was the implementation of the Next Gen platform. Next Gen is the API from a lenders lenders, from an aggregators platform into the lender, and it is very, very common in the Australian Mortgage market, It would have about over 95% market share. Brighton didn't have Next Gen, and we saw that gap in our service offering to brokers, and in our never ending quest to be easy to deal with, we went live with next gen in November last year, and that has been a huge benefit to the business with brokers now seeing Brighton to be a lot easier to deal with. We also launched our Broker Portal, which allows brokers from the minute that a loan is submitted through Next Gen, through to our system, to track that loan application, right through to settlement. There's no need to call Brighton anymore whether or email us that brokers can simply log into our Broker Portal and can have live tracking of where their deals are at. We are an active user of Quickly.Quickly is a system that a lot of brokers use to compare lenders for a particular scenario that a customer has and I'm very pleased to say that Brighton features in the top five lenders across the entire Australian Home Loan market for many of those scenarios. And then for our customers, we're also very pleased to say that we've launched a Customer Service Portal. This is the Banking Portal that customers use, post settlement and the new portal has so many new features that it makes the online banking experience, post settlement for our customers a very seamless experience. 

Bennett Richardson  00:03:53 

Great, some good things happening on the tech front. So the next question is, comes up often with tech issues. So, from your perspective, how does Brighton balance automation and digital tools with the human side the human relationships that brokers and borrowers value? 

Jason Azzopardi  00:04:10 

Yeah, look, Brighton is absolutely a people business. Its success has been and will always be built on our people. I'm very pleased to say that the team that we've assembled at Brighton is market leading, in terms of relationship, in terms of service to brokers. We have a very, very highly experienced credit team based in Sydney. They are very, very well, well experienced on complex issues, which means they can help brokers get deals across the line. Our BDM team right around Australia set a great example for our brand. They're very, very responsive to our brokers, and are held in very, very high regard, and are a key, key pillar of Brighton success. All of these teams, not only credit and sales, but right across Brighton, are backed by technology, and our structure of technology, and our strategy for technology is to make to use tech as an enabler to make our people's ability to service their customers, whether it be brokers, whether it be the end home loan customer, whether it be an internal customer, that tech is continually being able to assist that be more efficient and give and give better responses to our customers. 

Bennett Richardson  00:05:26 

Great thanks a lot. All right, looking ahead, what's next for Brighton in terms of innovation? Are there any emerging technologies, products or partnerships that brokers should be excited about? 

Jason Azzopardi  00:05:36 

Yeah, I definitely like to think so. We actively engage brokers in surveys on a monthly basis, and we have a very, very high response rate from our brokers giving us feedback on that. On high operations, whether it be our BDM team, whether it be our credit process, whether it be our settlement process, and we take that feedback, and we're very active in going back to brokers and understanding what their wants and needs are, and then building that into our go forward strategy. So, for us, we want to continue investing in our core technology, sustainable, to sustainably scale the business, to remain easy to deal with. Brighton's mantra is to remain easy to deal with and we've got two great core systems, our Origination system, based on Salesforce, and our post settlement, our core banking system, which is on IntoFi and we are very, very focused on investing into those core technologies, but doing that very strategically to ensure we are providing the biggest benefit, to our customers and our broker partners. We're going to continue expanding into the broker network through national aggregator partnerships. I spoke about mortgage choice earlier, we're very excited to announce that we're going to have another large announcement on that space soon, and that's going to make the Brighton products even more accessible to 1000s more brokers and customers in Australia, and I talked also talked earlier about continuing to diversify into the Commercial sector. That's been a slow process for us, while we get the strategy right, we've now got the core leaders in place in the Commercial space, and we're very, very focused on building the Commercial products to brokers, as we're seeing, a number of brokers can start to increase to write commercial loans. And finally, we're going to launch a new product in Q3 this year, which will be the SMSF product, that will basically mean there won't be another any lender in Australia that has a product that Brighton doesn't roll. So there's a lot of innovation, whether it be technology, products or people. We're very, very excited about the future and building on the pillars that we have so far and looking to continue to grow into the future. 

Bennett Richardson  00:07:40 

Excellent, there's a lot to look forward to, full steam ahead.  

Jason Azzopardi  00:07:43 

Thank you.  

Bennett Richardson  00:07:44 

And that concludes this Australian Broker Leader Profile. Thanks to Jason Azzopardi for brightening our day, and thanks for watching Australian Broker TV. Bye for now.