Built for brokers, backed by brokers

Orde financial is celebrating five years in the business. It’s hard to believe that in such a short space of time the non-bank lender has emerged as the powerhouse that it is.

Since launching in late 2020, ORDE has settled more than $6 billion in mortgages across Australia, helped over 10,000 Australian borrowers and grown to 150 team members across the country.

Managing directors Paul Wells and Ryan Harkness, chief executive and chief lending officer respectively, lead the business together and had a clear vision from the outset. They wanted to build a new major non-bank lender with a complete broker experience in mind, and to service all deal types, particularly those that other non-bank lenders often neglect.

Wells and Harkness shared some candid views with MPA when discussing ORDE’s first five years.

Sum of the parts

“When ORDE came to market, many brokers were fed up and wanted a better lending experience. Lenders weren’t responding, favouring their own interests and success – success built on the support of the very brokers they were taking for granted,” Wells told MPA.

Harkness added, “We focus on reliable approvals of complex deals that other lenders can’t or won’t support, delivered with really high service standards.” This ethos spans the full set of products ORDE has to offer.

Looking back, Wells and Harkness said that “our potential was clear to brokers from day one, when we launched the business with a highly flexible product range across residential, commercial and SMSF”.

No new lender, in their view, “has launched with that breadth already in hand. Since then, we’ve added construction, Prestige and are about to expand our interest-only range”.

It’s an undeniably bullish attitude, but they point to the solid growth in broker support, settlement volumes and team footprint to justify it.

“Our growth is really just the sum of lots of good individual experiences and successes leading to satisfied brokers,” Wells said, adding: “Our success is evidence that ORDE is delivering for brokers and the result of our ability to consistently provide an experience that secures their ongoing support.”

It’s not like the founders are lacking on the CV front. Harkness worked for nearly a decade at La Trobe Financial, one of Australia’s largest non-bank lenders. Before going on to create ORDE, he was the firm’s chief operating officer. Wells’ stint at La Trobe Financial lasted for closer to 12 years, during which time he acted variously as chief investment officer, head of funding and strategy, and chief financial officer. This enviable range of experience gave them invaluable insights into how a leading non- bank works and can be improved, setting the stage for the genesis of ORDE in early 2020.

“We knew the ‘best of all’ combination required across product, service standards and culture,” said Wells. “The ORDE launch team had already delivered every product in our range throughout our many years of non-bank management experience.

“But we also believe that only by building a new business, ground up, with reset culture and operations, can a lender comprehensively maintain exceptional service standards at the higher volumes now received by large lenders.”

More than numbers

For ORDE’s managing directors, success is not just measured in volume numbers. While the loan book has undeniably grown at a decent clip, there’s more that motivates them.

Wells said, “The key growth hasn’t so much been in asset levels, which have met our expectations, as in putting together and growing the very specific culture and skill sets across a large team – both when bringing in great talent and experience, as well as developing it internally.”

Harkness added, “Our growth has always been aligned to our determination to give brokers the experience they deserve, singularly focused on delivering the solutions and exceptional service that ORDE has now become known for at an ever-expanding scale.”

The centrepiece of ORDE’s business strategy, they said, is “to grow a culture centred on broker needs”.

“A real highlight has been seeing brokers, small and big, who are willing to try what we offer, and often enough provide their generous recognition of our team. We get emails and responses all the time from brokers whose daily life is changing for the better.”

Overcoming challenges

While there is much to be proud of, no one can be fooled into believing that building a new business from the ground up is easy. At ORDE, “scaling and delivering a high-skills culture and team is hard to do, and it’s definitely the primary challenge we focus on”, said Wells. “And it would be impossible without a team wanting the same outcome.”

ORDE uses several cultural and operational frameworks to achieve this, including the ‘One Lending Team’ and ‘ORDE Broker Experience’. ORDE’s One Lending Team is a highly integrated and aligned team spanning distribution, credit and settlements functions, who work to benefit brokers and their customers. This unified vision of team culture, without silos, allows for the ORDE Broker Experience – the consistent delivery of end-to-end services and solutions aligned to broker-oriented outcomes.

Watch your attitude

“More fundamentally, you need to decide what your value proposition is,” said Wells. “From the beginning, ORDE based its relevance on what we could bring to, add to, or improve on brokers’ businesses, and perhaps add to the whole broking sector if we forced common improvements to standards.”

To adhere to this philosophy, ORDE doesn’t accept direct applications from borrowers at all – everything originates via the broker channel. To do otherwise would be “a conflict with our core business partners: brokers”.

ORDE’s broker-only approach, and standing start, has allowed the lender to build its offering with a razor-sharp focus. “Our attitude was: listen to what brokers want, understand what brokers want, and then build ORDE out to give them what they want,” said Wells.

“Distractions are plentiful with success; that road is well trodden. To us, it’s about management discipline. 

“If we deliver on this fundamental orientation and focus for years, it may just give us the opportunity to be the best non-bank lender for brokers and their customers in Australia.”

ORDE currently partners with Australian mortgage brokers through top-tier aggregators and their subsidiaries, including Finsure, LMG, outsource Financial, SFG, YBR Aggregation, MoneyQuest and Nectar Mortgages, as well as dealing directly with credit licensees.

“Our distribution partners support our broker-first orientation and differentiated product position,” said Harkness. “We are focused on presenting ORDE to brokers across these partners. We also work with credit licensees outside of existing aggregators, and naturally, in time, we want to broaden that where it’s clear that brokers would like to deal with us.”

If ORDE truly is built for brokers, backed by brokers, it should be an easy sell.