Boss Money: Marie Mortimer
Meet Marie Mortimer, our latest Boss Money feature. Marie is the Managing Director of loans.com.au, one of Australia's largest online lenders. For those of you not familiar with loans.com.au, it is an online lender for home and car loans. For 10 years, Aussies have trusted the locally based loans.com.au team to support them with low home loan and car loan rates, approved quickly through the online loans.com.au app.
Since Marie started the business 10 years ago, she has grown loans.com.au into a company with $6 billion worth of home and car loans.
What I love about Marie is that she too is dedicated to improving financial literacy for all Australians and is particularly passionate about the FinTech industry in Australia. When she isn't at work, she loves to spend time with her husband and two young children.
What is loans.com.au?
loans.com.au is one of Australia’s largest online lenders. We have been in business for 10 years and have home loan and car loan customers all over Australia.
We are a part of Firstmac, the 13th largest lender in Australia, who is a wholesale funder of home loans. I started loans.com.au from nothing and grew it to $6billion worth of customers all across Australia.
That’s no small sum! So, what inspired you to start your own business ?
At the time, I was the IT Manager for Firstmac. I had both experience as a finance professional and then an IT professional and I had a love of bringing the two together to innovate and implement change.
We had been sitting on the domain loans.com.au and we thought it was time to give it a go and run a trial. I launched our pink website in 2011 as a way to connect retail customers to our wholesale business. We already had an amazing back-end platform for home loans which we distributed only via brokers and third-party sales. We put a customer interface on the front and loans.com.au was the first lender in Australia to offer customers a full end to end online home loan application connected to an almost instant credit decisioning system.
It was also the first time in Australia that retail customers had access to a wholesale funder, which meant they were offered some of the most innovative and cheapest products in the country. 10 years later loans.com.au has $6billion of Firstmac’s $13billion loan book and a strong well-known brand in Australia.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
To trust myself a little bit more, and not listen to the people around me who were very negative about change.
I was 29 at the time, and it was a bit crazy to begin with as we had an influx of applications and we were doing daily releases to improve our processes without impacting customers.
Everything works out with a plan and persistence, and it’s important to block out the noise, especially the naysayers who don’t have belief in you. Don’t second guess yourself!
What's the biggest business money lesson you've learned since starting your business?
You have to invest money to build systems, but you need to be practical with your projections and your numbers.
Every little change counts to the bottom line and you need to break it down and track it in order to achieve the bigger picture.
Don’t be afraid to get down and dirty in the detail, especially with the financial side of your business. It’s how your will identify issues as well as plans to make adjustments for success.
What's been your biggest financial win as a business owner?
I think getting to the large book size that we have now has been amazing and we represent almost half of Firstmac’s business.
We’ve been able to diversify our business in the last 10 years, which has been exciting and this has opened up some very good funding lines for the group, due to the quality of our loan book and our excellent reputation in the market.
What kind of legacy do you wish to create with your business and why?
I want to create a legacy of change and reinvention
I want to create a legacy of change and reinvention. Things are constantly changing, particularly in FinTech, and I always want to ensure we are at the cutting edge of the change. It can feel crazy and we can feel stretched, but we are always positioned ahead of the change.
Evolution is important for sustainability and complacency can leave us behind.
What does your business empower you to do?
My business allows me to remain creative.
Finance can sound (and be) very boring for a lot of people, but there is so much opportunity out there and I love the creative side of our business where we can turn ideas into something real that actually empowers our customers and our people!
Who's in your 'A Team' ?
This is a hard one as I think there are so many people that help me on a day-to-day basis from our experienced executive team, through to new starters that come with new ideas.
I think it’s more important that you take advice from a range of people, don’t be afraid to ask questions and be open to a different opinion as that’s how you can form a plan forward and grow.
What advice would you give to another lady hoping to start her own business?
I think don’t let yourself get in the way with negative thoughts about why you can’t do it. There will be naysayers and there will be supporters, you just need to find your people and not second guess yourself. This is important especially if you have an idea and something that you are passionate about. You will regret it if you don’t take action and at least give yourself the opportunity to just give it a go.
The best piece of advice I have been given is that by not making a decision to do something you are ultimately making a decision, so you need to know if that sits well with you.
And finally, What are you looking forward to right now?
It’s a new financial year and I’m currently implementing our new 12 month strategy across the group. We have some really exciting things coming up in the next year, that will see us grow even further with the support of my amazing team! There is a lot to look forward to!
Thank you to Marie for taking the time to chat with me for Boss Money. Be sure to check out loans.com.au if you’re in the market for a great finance solution for your new home or car. You can also follow the company on LInkedin, Facebook , Twitter and Instagram.
To connect with Marie personally, you can find her on LInkedin and on her blog where you’ll find her chatting all things fintech, financial empowerment and innovation.