I've been in fintech and the mortgage industry for about a year and a half now. My background is in corporate and commercial law, where I spent years navigating slow-moving hierarchies before deliberately pivoting into this space.

Sometimes a fresh perspective from a seasoned professional in other fields is exactly what's needed. Coming from law into tech has given me a unique vantage point. I can see what people immersed in this industry for decades might miss.

And what I see is an industry at a crossroads, facing two critical challenges that will define its future.

The Battle for Relevance

Let's address the elephant in the room: banks are investing heavily in technology designed to remove brokers from the customer journey entirely. They're building direct-to-consumer platforms that replicate broker services without the relationship.

It's not subtle, and it's not stopping.

But I've come to understand the broking channel deeply. Not just the technology, but the pressures lenders face, the operational needs of small businesses, and what real families need when making their biggest financial decisions.

In the age of AI and automation, there's a dangerous assumption that efficiency means elimination. That if a process can be automated, the human in the middle becomes redundant.

But here's what I've learned: the response isn't to panic. It's to make brokers so valuable, so efficient, and so indispensable that removing them becomes unthinkable.

That means embracing technology that amplifies broker expertise rather than replaces it. Brokers who leverage good technology can provide faster service while maintaining the human judgment that complex lending decisions require.

It also means leaning into what technology can't replicate: genuine relationships, contextual expertise, and the collective intelligence that comes from experienced professionals helping each other solve difficult problems.

In an era pushing everyone toward AI-driven generalisation, human expertise becomes more valuable, not less.

The Gender Gap Nobody's Solving

The second challenge is one the industry talks about but rarely acts on: women make up only 30% of mortgage brokers.

For context, when I left law, it was approaching 50/50 gender representation. The mortgage industry is decades behind.

The reasons are systemic and deeply entrenched. Risk aversion. Capital access. Caregiving responsibilities that make entrepreneurship daunting. The list goes on.

But here's what frustrates me: we focus obsessively on recruitment while ignoring retention. We celebrate when women enter the industry, then wonder why they leave within a few years.

I've seen this pattern play out. Women join broking, struggle to build their book while managing family responsibilities, lack peer support for business challenges, and eventually return to salaried roles where the income is predictable and the risk is lower.

The industry loses talented professionals not because they can't do the work, but because the support structures don't exist.

What Actually Works

So what actually helps? Two things: infrastructure and community.

The infrastructure piece is straightforward. Technology that saves time benefits everyone, especially those juggling multiple responsibilities. When you can complete calculations in minutes instead of hours, suddenly managing clients around school pickup becomes feasible.

The community piece is harder but more important. Women need spaces to ask difficult business questions without judgment. How do I structure my fees? What do I do when a deal falls through and I've already spent hours on it? How do I manage cashflow in those first difficult years?

These aren't technical questions. They're business survival questions. And they're the ones that determine whether women stay in the industry or leave.

The hunger for peer-to-peer business mentoring is massive and largely unmet. When platforms create spaces for this kind of support, the response is overwhelming because it addresses a real gap.

My focus isn't just on getting women into the industry – it's on creating environments where they stay and succeed. That's the metric that matters, and it's the one too often ignored in diversity conversations.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's the thing about solving industry challenges: talk is cheap.

The mortgage industry doesn't need more panels about diversity or more think pieces about the future of broking. It needs platforms that make broker businesses sustainable. It needs peer networks that provide real-time business guidance. It needs technology that treats brokers as essential rather than expendable.

We need to stop celebrating good intentions and start measuring actual outcomes. How many women are still broking five years after they start? How many broker businesses fail not because of skill deficits but because of inadequate support systems?

Those are the metrics that really matter.

Kelly Eldridge is the Chief of Staff at Quickli, Australia’s leading technology provider for mortgage brokers.