From a strong foundation to a more complex operation

When Lydian Financial Services first spoke about Salestrekker three years ago, the focus was on centralising credit preparation, replacing spreadsheets, improving document security and giving brokers and clients better visibility through the lending process.

That foundation mattered as Lydian was still building the national professional services model that founders Chris Booth and Andrew Rocks had set out to create – connecting mortgage brokers with financial planning firms and giving brokers the operational support to spend more time on clients, partners and complex lending.

Today, the business is much larger and Lydian now has more than 20 brokers, works with over 120 financial planning firms and supports its network with a centralised operations team of 15 people in the Philippines. As a sub-aggregator within Specialist Finance Group (SFG), it also needs to maintain strong standards around risk, governance and compliance as it grows.

“The promise to the brokers from day one was that they would get their operations, support and processing done for their lending,” says Chris Booth, CEO of Lydian Financial Services. “That frees up their time to do more deals, work on more technical and complex deals, and spend time with their partners and clients.”

The challenge was no longer simply getting information into one place. Lydian needed a more sophisticated way to coordinate people, assign work, standardise processes and keep brokers, clients and financial planning partners informed.

Salestrekker 2.0 moves deeper into the business

Head of Operations and Service Delivery Tabatha Lee has been reshaping the way Lydian’s centralised operations team works. Salestrekker 2.0 now supports a much broader operating model than Lydian used with Salestrekker 1.0.

Instead of a broker handing an entire file to one team member, work can be allocated across the team according to task and skill level. More specialised work goes to highly qualified mortgage broking assistants, while other tasks can be managed by junior team members.

“Workflow is very, very important,” Tabatha says. “We’ve changed from broker delegation to one team member to allocating work across a whole team, including by task level and skill set.”

The difference is also visible to clients and partners. Welcome messages, status updates, templates and required document requests create more consistency as a deal progresses. Clients can see what documents are required and upload them directly through the client portal. Financial planning partners can securely share documents, follow progress and exchange notes with Lydian’s brokers and operations team through the partner portal.

For Chris, this is where the move to Salestrekker 2.0 becomes important. The earlier platform helped Lydian organise lending activity whilst Salestrekker 2.0 is becoming part of how the wider business operates.

“Salestrekker fits well within our partner base because they expect a lot of quality and risk controls from our software platform,” he says. “It gives us the framework to go to them with confidence.”

Faster work, stronger consistency and room to go further

The change is already producing practical results. Tabatha estimates the team is getting back a couple of hours a day across different tasks. Standard turnaround times have also improved.

“Some of the work that was taking two to three days is now taking a day,” Tabatha says. “That comes from using the right skill set and using Salestrekker.”

Standardised workflows also help Lydian maintain a higher level of consistency across files, which is important to both Lydian and SFG.

“We want all of our files to have a really high standard of compliance,” Chris says. “Using Salestrekker the way we have it working now, we’re able to sleep at night. The brokers sleep well at night.”

The next stage is already taking shape. Lydian’s team is using Salestrekker’s AI tools to help summarise information and support everyday work, while looking ahead to document reading, ID checks, further automation and better use of customer data.

Chris sees that as the clearest difference between where Lydian started and where it is now. Salestrekker helped establish the digital foundation. Salestrekker 2.0 gives the business a broader framework to keep improving how work is allocated, how information moves and how people are supported as the network grows.

For Lydian, that is now the goal – using more of the platform, more deliberately, to give brokers time back, help its operations team work more effectively and support a growing national network with greater consistency and confidence.