'Successful brokers distinguish themselves by going beyond the basics'
In this regular series, MPA catches up with a business development manager or relationship manager to get to know the people’s people of the industry. This time around, Michael Ponchard, senior credit quality manager at Bankwest, discusses having confidence, challenging himself, and his love of the Parramatta Eels.
Job title: Senior credit quality manager
Years in the industry: 15
Company: Bankwest
Location: Hunter Valley, NSW
What did you do before entering the industry?
I worked for Vodafone straight out of school before moving into a Bankwest Branch during the east coast expansion in 2009.
I worked my way through various roles before becoming a BDM supporting our broker partners. I was always passionate about solution-based lending, which led to my current role.
What is your role and how do you support brokers?
I now lead a team of Credit Quality Managers who support our BDMs and their brokers workshopping scenarios pre-submission.
These scenarios are typically complex in nature or require a common-sense approach with an aspect of the application being outside of scope.
Brokers rightly do not want to lodge an application when they know there is something that may cause hold ups, so we look for solutions for these complex applications to ensure a seamless approval at time of lodgement.
What’s a goal that you aim to achieve in your role?
Our aim is to provide our brokers and their customers an extra level of confidence pre-submission when lodging to Bankwest.
We know how much work is required from a broker for each submission and we want to ensure that brokers can address their concerns pre-submission rather than wait for the application to be stopped and must fight for approval at that point.
What’s your favourite part of the job?
It’s hard to beat seeing a complex application move to unconditional where the broker may have felt that they had no way forward or had been knocked back elsewhere – and most importantly, knowing you have helped the broker make a significant difference to the life of our mutual customer.
What sets successful brokers apart?
The ability to present all the pros and cons upfront, pre-submission, allows us to challenge when needed and make an informed decision.
When required we can then seek additional documentation to support our decision and include this in our commentary. Having total visibility upfront allows us to present the application to the validator or credit manager with all the required mitigants to make an informed decision first touch.
What should brokers expect from their state manager or BDMs?
From my perspective it is critically important that brokers can achieve confidence from their BDM pre-submission. Bankwest BDMs are highly skilled and for most applications can provide a definitive answer without my team’s involvement.
When they do need additional workshopping, we want to ensure that they never have to revert to ‘lodge it and hope for the best’ as we know this doesn’t work for brokers.
What do you provide to brokers that makes you valuable to them?
On average, my team workshop 500 complex applications each week and having this level of exposure allows us to continually challenge ourselves to find solutions.
We support each Bankwest BDM across the country and offer help to every accredited broker. From the brand new to industry and first time users of Bankwest to experienced brokers with something “out of the box” we are here to help.
We are happy to screen-share via teams with your BDM and walk you through our proposed solution which also supports your development as a broker.
Describe your ideal weekend.
The perfect weekend for me would be watching a Parramatta Eels win, followed by a Star Wars movie marathon with my wife and kids. Unfortunately, none of the above is their ideal weekend, so it remains a pipe dream!
