Finsure seemed to turn around under BNK’s several years of...

Finsure seemed to turn around under BNK’s several years of ownership - - and the sector seemed hot with M&A this year as REA Group acquired Mortgage Choice; AFG made an aborted attempt to merge with Connective; and commercial finance broker COG Financial Services acquired an 80% interest in Access Capital (a South Australia/Northern Territory asset finance broker).

A reverse timeline of Finsure:

BNK’s Finsure division settled A$22.2 billion of mortgages in the year to June 2021, an increase of 42.4% over the previous year, with the aggregation loan book growing 24.5% to $56.6 billion and broker numbers up 15% to 2000.

In 2020, in its first full year for Finsure under BNK, Finsure contributed A$22.3 million of revenue and $9 million of pre-tax profit to the group result of $5.23 million. Finsure, was servicing 1740 brokers, increased loan settlements by 23% to $15.6 billion and had increased its loan book by 19.4% to $45.5 billion.

In early 2018, Finsure completed the acquisition of white-label wholesale mortgage manager Nationalcorp Home Loans. With a loan book of around $725 million, the acquisition increased the size of Finsure's wholesale portfolio to $2.2 billion and total historical book to $30.6 billion.

In November 2017 listed ADI Goldfields Money (subsequently BNK) proposed a friendly $97 million script merger with Finsure, resulting in Finsure shareholders controlling 63% of the merged entity. At the time Goldfields ‘fair appraisal’ valuation of $61 million of Finsure was in question as earlier in 2017 a key shareholder, Resimac, offloaded a 30% stake in Finsure - but detailed that it only received $2.3 million as proceeds from the sale.

In May 2017, the AFR reported Finsure had finalised a pre-IPO funding round at A$13.5 million. At the time Finsure claimed it was "working with over 800 brokers, and have established a loan book of over $14 billion."

Mortgage Choice sold its loss making mortgage aggregator, LoanKit, to Finsure in August 2013. LoanKit serviced 330 brokers writing around A$150 million of loans a month, and a loan book worth $2.4 billion.