I bought a house about eight months ago. The solicitor who handled the conveyancing, the one I'd paid to guide me through the biggest legal decision of my adult life, I could not tell you her name today.
I spoke to her once. Got an email on exchange. Got a two-minute call on completion. That was it. No conversation in between. No sense that she understood what the transaction meant to me or to my family. Not bad, not good, just kind of nothing. A transaction, a vague professional on the other end of the line, a job that got done.
And I remember thinking, in the middle of it, that this is exactly the experience most clients have with their mortgage broker.
In most brokerages, the submission call isn't a call. It's an email. The research gets finished, the product gets picked, the case gets keyed, the mortgage gets submitted, the client moves in. Protection either got mentioned once in passing weeks earlier, or it didn't come up at all. The broker files the case as a completion and moves on.
Most brokers in this industry are running submission calls that aren't submission calls, and calling themselves professionals for it. The client leaves with a mortgage and no cover. The broker leaves income on the table every single month. Both of those are real, and only one of them ever gets talked about.
When a client takes on a mortgage, they take on a significant debt. With significant debt comes significant risk. The broker's job is to eliminate that risk wherever possible, from both known and unknown threats.
That is what the submission call is actually for. Not the rate. Not the product features. Not the cashback or the free valuation. The risk. The real, specific, quantifiable risk the client is about to sign for, and what the broker is going to do to help them address it.
Brokers who genuinely believe that run a completely different conversation from the ones who don't. They aren't selling protection at the end of a mortgage process. They're advising on risk, and the mortgage happens to be part of it. The client feels the difference from the first minute, because the broker is no longer performing a close. They're doing the job the client thought they were paying for.
There's a related failure that decides whether any of this can hold together, and it happens weeks before the submission call. Documents. Most brokers chase them once the research is already underway. When the payslips and bank statements finally land, something doesn't quite match, the research gets redone, the recommendation gets adjusted, and the broker arrives at the submission call apologising for changed numbers. They have already lost the client's trust and they don't realise they lost it two weeks earlier. Everything downstream of that moment, including the protection conversation, lands on someone who is quietly wondering whether the broker is on top of their case. The answer to that question decides the answer to every question that follows it.
The professionals I respect most in this industry have accepted something that changes the shape of everything. The submission call is not a formality. It is the moment the whole process either pays off or falls flat, and its quality is decided long before the broker joins the call. Documents in hand before the research, not during. The submission booked as a call, not an email. The conversation run as advice on risk, not as a product pitch. That single sequence changes the entire economics of a brokerage.
Most brokers think the sale ended when the client said yes to the mortgage. It didn't. That was the middle of the conversation.
And the client is still sitting there, quietly, waiting for the part that would have made the whole thing mean something.
