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Mid-size brokerages punch above their weight
Ahead of the 2026 Australian Mortgage Awards, finalists in the Brokerage of the Year (6–20 Staff) category explain how discipline, technology and culture are driving strong growth
Mimi Jawad
Resimac
Industry experts
Heinrich Brendel
Blue Crane Capital
Peter Colman
Aussie Prospect
Richard Garner
Crew Financial
Mimi Jawad is Resimac’s national sales manager, aggregation and partnerships. Based in Sydney, she focuses on building strong relationships with aggregator partners across mortgages and asset and equipment finance. Jawad brings more than 18 years of experience in financial services and is known for creating successful lender and aggregator partnerships, growing broker networks and supporting customer-focused outcomes. With deep industry knowledge and a strong understanding of broker needs, she is passionate about collaboration, helping brokers succeed and developing partnerships that support sustainable growth for all stakeholders.
Resimac
Mimi Jawad
Heinrich Brendel, a dedicated athlete and driven professional, journeyed to Australia in pursuit of his passion for rugby in 2020. Equipped with a degree in financial management, he seamlessly integrated into the finance realm, joining Blue Crane Capital in April 2022. Initially focusing on settlements, his aptitude for analysis and commitment to excellence led him to transition into an analyst role. Brendel not only provides invaluable support to brokers but also exhibits a keen interest in internal reporting and operational strategies. Continuously striving for growth, he is currently pursuing an advanced diploma in accounting, further enhancing his expertise and contributions to the team.
Blue Crane Capital
Heinrich Brendel
Peter Colman is a dedicated mortgage broker at Aussie Prospect, helping clients navigate the complex world of buying a property. With access to loan options from banks and lenders across Australia, he ensures his clients find the best fit for their needs. Understanding your financial situation is crucial, and Colman takes the time to assess your borrowing capacity, whether you’re looking for a home loan or an investment loan. The property market can be daunting, but with his guidance, you can confidently explore your loan options. He will help you understand interest rates and loan amounts, ensuring you’re well-prepared when applying for a loan. Colman is committed to simplifying the application process, making it easier for you to get pre-approved and move forward with your property purchase.
Aussie Prospect
Peter Colman
Richard Garner is an award-winning specialist broker and director at Crew Financial, a Brisbane brokerage with annual settlements exceeding $282 million. A qualified financial adviser and ASIC-appointed responsible manager, he has worked in financial services since 2002, specialising in residential, commercial and equipment finance, with extensive property investment and development experience. Under his leadership, Crew Financial has been named SFG Queensland Brokerage of the Year five times. Garner is a former SFG Queensland Broker of the Year, a two-time SFG Technology Award winner and 2022 REB Residential Mortgage Broker of the Year. He serves on the Qantas Superannuation committee at Australian Retirement Trust. Outside broking, Garner flies A330s internationally, served in the Australian Army and is a father of three.
Crew Financial
Richard Garner
Nitish Kumar is franchise owner and senior mortgage broker at Loan Market Canberra, where he leads a growing team of brokers and support staff with a strong focus on culture, leadership and client experience. Under his leadership, the business has become one of Canberra’s leading mortgage brokerages, helping thousands of clients and building a reputation reflected in more than 700 five-star Google reviews in just seven years. Kumar is passionate about developing people, building high-performing teams and creating a business where growth and great culture can coexist.
Loan Market Canberra
Nitish Kumar
“For a brokerage of 6–20 staff, success is about building sustainable growth while continuing to deliver customers the service they deserve”
Mimi Jawad,
Resimac
THE MID-SIZE brokerage is at a unique stage in its business life cycle – while it has often outgrown a boutique garage operation, it is yet to become a corporate machine. Let’s call them the teenagers of the brokerage world.
Six to twenty staff is a pivotal, interesting size. It is big enough to need real systems and small enough that every hire still changes the culture of the place. This crucial formative stage of development and its importance to the future of the broader broking community underpins why the Australian Mortgage Awards created a category for it, and why Resimac chose to put its name behind the prize this year.
“Continuing to lean on our current source of business and getting really close to our clients has generated additional business in a great market”
Matt Spears
Evoke Capital
“One of the big things we’ve prioritised is creating a high-performance culture and really imposing accountability on all of the individual brokers”
Connor Perry
Money Links
A well-timed pivot into a new product line delivered similar results without a single new office for Nitish Kumar, franchise owner and senior mortgage broker at Loan Market Canberra.
“A big focus for us this year was developing our brokers and getting them to be more productive, so we spent a lot of time building their teams and turning them into leaders,” Kumar says. Then came the pivot. “We also diversified into asset finance about 13 months ago, which was a great offering for our clients, because we were primarily doing residential home loans.”
Peter Colman, mortgage broker at Aussie Prospect, found extra growth by looking sideways rather than simply upward. “We grew the team that was already there, but the bigger focus was diversification and finding additional opportunities within our customer base, and extending that out to referral partners,” Colman says.
“We grew the team that was already there, but the bigger focus was diversification and finding additional opportunities within our customer base, and extending that out to referral partners”
Peter Colman,
Aussie ProspecT
He credits the fee-for-service model for funding the rest. “It’s given us the ability to invest in our credit operations, marketing and client service infrastructure, rather than relying on a one-man band model, and that’s created a broader demand through referrals from business owners dealing with the same issues,” he says.
At Blue Crane Capital, growth traces back to a single planning session rather than any one new hire, product or office. “We’ve grown substantially in the FY26 year, both on settlement volume and deal quantity, by about 45%,” says Heinrich Brendel, associate director and analyst at Blue Crane Capital.
Technology finds its place
Behind the growth figures sits a quieter argument about where artificial intelligence fits into a broking business, and the finalists are largely in agreement that it supports people rather than replacing them.
Loan Market Ignite has turned two of its own credit analysts into brokers, treating internal promotion as a growth strategy in its own right and folds technology into that same philosophy.
“We’re really big on culture, high performance and high support, upskilling and upgrading people. We’ve had two of our credit analysts become brokers, which is a big part of our journey,” Thompson says. The same philosophy extends to how the business treats new tools. “As AI evolves, you’ve just got to keep leaning in, adapting and adding the components that make it work for you and your customers.”
“For a brokerage of 6–20 staff, success is about building sustainable growth while continuing to deliver customers the service they deserve,” says Mimi Jawad, national sales manager, aggregation and partnerships at Resimac.
She points to a specific mix of resourcefulness behind that growth. “It’s about making the most of the resources available to you, whether that’s your aggregator, your peers or increasingly, AI,” she says. “That’s why this award matters, because it’s recognising the brokerages performing strongly now while building strong foundations for future success.”
He traces the method back to a single afternoon. “It’s rewinding to 12 months ago, sitting down together and setting big, ambitious goals and being unwavering in how and when we want to achieve them. It boils down to two components: having high-performance people who can deliver, and systems and processes that let them achieve those goals,” he says.
Unconditional Finance took a different route again, doing more with fewer people rather than simply adding headcount. This contributed to a record year with “close to a thousand loans settled by my team in the last financial year,” says Chris Raymond, founder and principal broker at Unconditional Finance.
Restructuring the back office mattered as much as the loan book, he explains. “We really peeled apart our end-to-end process and put the right people in the right positions. We actually had fewer staff this financial year than the previous one, but we wrote more volume,” he says. “We just got smarter about how we operate, and clients are getting a better experience because of it.”
“We opened our third office last year and added two more brokers. We’re huge believers in Lean Six Sigma and process improvement, so we’re continually doing that,” says Andrew Thompson, mortgage broker and head of growth at Loan Market Ignite.
Lean Six Sigma, a method for stripping out waste and inconsistency from a process, has become something of a quiet trend among brokerages chasing efficiency at scale. Thompson puts the office expansion alongside a second factor entirely. “Between the office and the embracing of AI, those are probably the key drivers of our growth,” he says.
He frames the shift as a change of identity as much as strategy. “It’s about being more of a community-focused business rather than just a bespoke home loan specialist,” he says.
Ryan Sweeney, CEO and co-founder of FRONT Financial, leveraged his client base rather than simply broadening it. “Our growth stemmed from having a clear niche and doubling down on it. We specialise in advising small and medium business owners on where to borrow money across banks and non-banks and focusing on the self-employed aspect has been a major driver,” Sweeney says.
Read on
At Crew Financial, consistency has become the real headline rather than any single year’s result.
“This year has been one of our strongest in history. We’ve seen a strong lift in loan volume year on year, with approval rates comfortably ahead of industry norms,” says Richard Garner, specialist broker and director at Crew Financial.
He is proudest of the pattern rather than any single figure. “What we’re probably most proud of is that it’s been consistent every year,” he says. “We stopped working as individual brokers and built a fully fledged team, with specialists in each role around the client, from call centres to associate brokers to credit teams split onshore and offshore.”
For Unconditional Finance, aligning onshore and offshore teams around identical targets mattered as much as any single platform. “We realigned our teams onshore and offshore, so our Australian brokers, their credit analysts here, and their overseas partners all have the same targets,” Raymond says.
A clear career path, he adds, keeps the whole structure moving. “That clear career path allows our team to perform at their maximum capabilities, and we’ve put a lot of focus on our pre-submission process so that when we do submit a deal, it only needs one touch.”
At Mortgage Pros, the same segregation of roles that solved last year’s bottleneck has become the foundation of the entire operating model. “The segregation of roles and having clearly defined outcomes for each department allowed us to write significantly more, with just six brokers on the team,” Munfaredi says.
Resimac is a leading alternative lender for residential mortgages and asset finance in Australia, with a broad suite of competitive, award-winning products that cater to diverse customer types and needs. We offer competitive interest rates and flexible home loan options with great features to a wide range of customers, including the self-employed and those with previous credit impairments.
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Published 21 Sep 2026
Chris Raymond
Unconditional Finance
Connor Perry
Money Links
Russell Munfaredi
Mortgage Pros
Nitish Kumar
Loan Market Canberra
Chris Raymond is founder and principal broker at Unconditional Finance, with 18 years of experience in the mortgage and finance industry. An award-winning broker and property investor, he specialises in strategic loan structuring, complex lending and helping clients build sustainable property portfolios. Under his leadership, Unconditional Finance has grown into an award-winning brokerage supporting clients across Australia. Raymond has consistently ranked among Australia’s leading brokers, including being named #1 in SFG’s Top 50 Loan Writers and 2025 Residential Broker of the Year at the Australian Mortgage Awards. He is passionate about education, strategy and delivering exceptional client outcomes.
Unconditional Finance
Chris Raymond
Connor Perry is head of sales and senior finance strategist at Money Links. He enjoys working in the finance industry to help people achieve their dreams through property. From first home buyers to experienced investors, Perry believes that no scenario is too complex and is passionate about keeping it real, genuine and simple in his approach to every client. He was recognised nationally in 2021 as the Newcomer of the Year at the Australian Broking Awards for his excellence in the industry as a new broker. Since then, his skills and dedication have only increased, and he is currently working toward a master’s in applied finance. In his spare time, Perry enjoys spending time with his family, exercising outdoors, watching sports and listening to country music.
Money Links
Connor Perry
Russell Munfaredi is managing director and senior mortgage broker at Mortgage Pros. In addition to assisting new clients with finance, he manages the team and builds the company strategy. After working over a decade in finance, Munfaredi joined Mortgage Pros in 2016. His wealth of knowledge, unstoppable drive and impeccable service has been the key driver of Mortgage Pros’ success. Munfaredi holds himself and our team to the highest standard which is why our service is considered one of the best in the industry.
Mortgage Pros
Russell Munfaredi
number of staff
total loan volume in the past 12 months (1 Jul 2025 – 30 Jun 2026)
year-over-year growth
lead-generation strategies and results
client retention rate
quality of submissions the nominee has made over the past year
conversion rate during the past 12 months (1 Jul 2025 – 30 Jun 2026)
customer service approach and its effectiveness
value proposition and stakeholder engagement strategy
broker training and development programs
Relevant factors for AMA winner selection
Category: Brokerage of the Year (6–20 Staff)
Source: AB
Growth that outpaces the market
Among this year’s finalists, the growth numbers are impressive, and marketing spend is where several stories begin. Evoke Capital had gone five and a half years without a marketing budget before this year.
“We grew about 80% year on year, mainly attributed to hiring and scaling our credit team and bringing in new brokers. We also really leaned into marketing this year, which wasn’t something we had done before,” says Matt Spears, founder of Evoke Capital.
The other half of the equation, he adds, was proximity to existing clients. “Continuing to lean on our current source of business and getting really close to our clients has generated additional business in a great market,” he says.
At Money Links, the growth story is about internal culture. “Our growth was 71% year on year for us, and we’re a team of 17, five brokers and 12 support staff,” explains Connor Perry, head of sales and senior finance strategist at Money Links.
He credits accountability rather than any single tactic. “One of the big things we’ve prioritised is creating a high-performance culture and really imposing accountability on all of the individual brokers,” he says. “That resulted in every broker having their own record year, and as a group, a huge uptick in what we do.”
Not every growth story starts with a strategy session. Sometimes, it starts with a bottleneck that simply has to be fixed, as Russell Munfaredi, managing director and senior mortgage broker at Mortgage Pros, found out.
“Our bottleneck was mainly the ability to assess files. We couldn’t handle as big a volume as we could have accessed through our marketing, so we had to tone that down after capitalising on a few AI agents that simplified and improved the quality of our assessment process,” Munfaredi says. The fix also involved two new brokers. “Now we have six brokers on the sales team, and that was the main contributor to that growth.”
Other finalists chose to grow physical locations, betting on bricks and mortar as much as headcount.
“A big focus for us this year was developing our brokers and getting them to be more productive, so we spent a lot of time building their teams and turning them into leaders”
Nitish Kumar, Loan Market Canberra
“Our growth stemmed from having a clear niche and doubling down on it”
Ryan Sweeney
FRONT Financial
He sees more of the same ahead. “We believe we have the highest efficiency per broker company in the industry, and we’re going to keep utilising more AI to be more efficient on the assessment side.”
At Money Links, the technology conversation keeps circling back to time rather than automation for its own sake.
“AI hasn’t replaced the personal side of broking. If anything, it’s given us more capacity to focus on what’s important, which is the client experience,” Perry says. The result, he adds, has changed where new business comes from. “The majority of our business is generated through word-of-mouth referrals, and we’re not reliant on referral partners at all.”
The payoff, he says, is trust built well before any paperwork. “By the time the client sees their options, we’ve built rapport with them and they understand our business model, our types of clients and what their options are.”
Crew Financial has a communication approach focused on detailed structure. “We’ve got a 34-point process for maintaining communication, because we wanted clients to be ahead of the information rather than chasing us for it. It centres on where you are now, what’s happening next, and how long it will take,” Garner says. “We’ve also gone outside traditional mortgage broking recognition into the aviation industry, which is our niche market.”
“[Our success] boils down to two components: having high-performance people who can deliver, and systems and processes that let them achieve those goals”
HEINRICH BRENDEL, BLUE CRANE CAPITAL
Loan Market Canberra has turned its Google reviews into a kind of scoreboard, one that Kumar checks as closely as settlement figures.
“I don’t think communication can ever be too much for a client. I’ve never had a client complain that they’ve heard from us too much,” Kumar says. The numbers back up the approach. “We’ve got 700 five-star Google reviews in seven years, which is important because it shows the brokers are providing a service where the client feels comfortable leaving that kind of feedback, and repeat clients and referrals are another metric we use.”
At Aussie Prospect, consistency across a franchise network means every client gets the same experience regardless of which broker they see. “It’s important for myself and the other franchisees of Aussie Prospect to ensure that we follow that bouncing ball, so the journey from inquiry through to settlement remains aligned to the Aussie Prospect values,” Colman says.
Regular check-ins, he explains, keep that promise honest. “We hold regular morning meetings with the broker team to share best practice, and we have a broker meeting every Tuesday where both the broker team and the support team are congratulated on the work they’ve done for customers.”
“We actually had fewer staff this financial year than the previous one, but we wrote more volume. We just got smarter about how we operate, and clients are getting a better experience because of it”
Chris Raymond, Unconditional Finance
There’s a reason so many of the brokerage world’s most interesting stories are being written at exactly this size of enterprise. Six to twenty staff is where a founder’s instincts get tested against real systems, and where the decisions made now, about people, culture and technology, will compound for years to come. This is the period when foundations are built that tomorrow’s corporate machines look back on and know that they set the right course.
With over two decades of experience in the financial services industry, Andrew Thompson is a seasoned mortgage broker and a visionary leader in the mortgage and lending sector. Currently serving as the head of growth at Loan Market Ignite, he combines his deep industry expertise with innovative strategies to drive growth and deliver exceptional outcomes for clients. His passion for empowering clients and his ability to simplify complex financial processes make him a trusted advisor in the mortgage industry. Whether you’re navigating your first home purchase or exploring investment opportunities, Thompson is dedicated to helping you achieve your property goals with confidence.
Loan Market Ignite
Andrew Thompson
Ryan Sweeney is CEO and co-founder of FRONT Financial, a specialist finance firm redefining what Australians should expect from a lending partner. Since co-founding FRONT in 2024, Sweeney has led the business through rapid national growth, building a high-performance team focused on solving complex lending challenges. With a strategic mindset and relentless drive to challenge conventional finance, he leads through action, accountability and an unwavering commitment to exceptional outcomes. Sweeney is passionate about combining technical expertise, technology and genuine relationships to deliver smarter finance solutions, while building a scalable business that raises the standard for lending across Australia.
FRONT Financial
Ryan Sweeney
Matt Spears is an award-winning banker, broker and property investor who has worked in residential and commercial finance for over 15 years. During his time at Westpac, he had the opportunity to advise a diverse range of clientele, including first home buyers, property investors, business owners and high-net-worth individuals. His advice and high standards of service resulted in him consistently being recognised as one of the top bankers in the country. Spears has a passion for people, property and finance, which is why he established Evoke Capital to simplify the finance process for all Australians.
Evoke Capital
Matt Spears
Andrew Thompson
Loan Market Ignite
Ryan Sweeney
FRONT Financial
Matt Spears
Evoke Capital
At Blue Crane Capital, Brendel points to what he calls a pod system, designed so no client is ever waiting on a single person. “It’s about clear and early communication, not waiting to be followed up by a client before you get in touch. It’s about being proactive and being super clear,” Brendel says.
Recognition, in his view, is only part of the picture. “There are metrics like Google reviews and award nominations, which mean a lot, but the biggest markers for me are repeat customers and the fact that referral partners keep sending us business and keep trusting us,” he says.
Source: Resimac
in every major state and territory
BDMs
accredited brokers
17,000
in assets under management
$15.9bn
mortgages and asset and equipment finance customers
100,000
years part of the lending landscape
40
Resimac by the numbers
“This year has been one of our strongest in history. We’ve seen a strong lift in loan volume year on year, with approval rates comfortably ahead of industry norms”
Richard Garner,
Crew Financial
Client experience as a competitive edge
For many of the finalists, the conversation is less about systems and more about the relationship with the client.
FRONT Financial has built an onboarding process long enough that most brokerages would consider it excessive, and Sweeney sees that as the entire point. “Our clients often have complex or nuanced situations that are a little different from what the average broker sees, so we have a highly structured onboarding process. The client gets a first call of 15–20 minutes to understand what our business is about, and generally we’ll take two hours before we even get documents off them,” Sweeney explains.
“We’re really big on culture, high performance and high support, upskilling and upgrading people”
Andrew Thompson, Loan Market Ignite
Evoke Capital rebuilt its aggregation system from the ground up rather than bolting automation onto an old process. “Systems and process have been at the core of the results we’ve achieved. We moved to a new aggregation system where we got really deep into automation, which helped increase the role segregation we had,” Spears explains.
He sees the technology gradually reshaping the back office. “AI is still in its infancy, but I’m seeing it take away some of the reliance we’ve had on offshore support, while continuing to enable growth,” he says.
“The segregation of roles and having clearly defined outcomes for each department allowed us to write significantly more, with just six brokers on the team”
Russell Munfaredi, Mortgage Pros
