Media Release: Asset finance leader announces the launch of COG Aggregation
Combined strengths providing even greater benefits to brokers
Australia’s biggest asset finance broker aggregator and distribution network, COG Financial Services Limited (ASX:COG), has announced the merger of its two aggregation arms: Platform Finance and Consolidated Finance Group (CFG). The result is COG Aggregation, the largest asset finance services business in the country.
COG Aggregation was unveiled at the group’s recent conference, attended by over 300 people including brokers and funders from around Australia. The merger of the two businesses means COG Aggregation can combine their resources, systems and services, making them available to all COG Aggregation members. It also makes the group responsible for $6.7 billion in volume*, the largest pool of asset finance volume in Australia.
The Platform Finance brand will continue to exist and be used by the group’s Strategic Partnerships business, providing white-labelled sales and processing support to mortgage brokers who have diversified into asset finance.
Damian Mantini, Head of Strategic Partnerships, who continues to be responsible for Platform Finance, calls the merger “perfect sense”. “Platform Finance and CFG have been working cooperatively for six years and sharing best practices – and we’re now in a position to fully integrate and unlock all of the benefits for our brokers. We’ll be delivering an enhanced, but still personalised experience to our brokers and aggregator partners. This union will allow us to accelerate our scalability to continue to grow and improve our offering,” he says.
Adds Mark Rayson, Head of COG Aggregations Services: “This merger is an important part of unlocking more capability and creates the largest, most cohesive and nimble asset finance aggregation company in Australia. Platform Finance and CFG are both powerful standalone providers of asset finance services to brokers around the country. They are market leaders in their segments, and this strategic union will combine their complementary strengths in asset finance and make them available in one place. It’s great news for our brokers who now fall into two distinct streams: mortgage brokers who diversify in asset finance will work with Platform Finance, and dedicated asset finance brokers will work with COG Aggregation.”
Key benefits of the merger for brokers:
- Greater support: Platform Finance maintains its strong, standalone BDM and broker support team for mortgage broker partners, while COG Aggregation staff have been unified into a team of five BDMs and dedicated broker support for asset finance brokers. Both teams have been scaled up to meet the growing needs of the group’s network and growth strategy.
- Simpler transacting: the merging of the two lender panels from each group allows all members to access to Australia’s largest and most diverse asset finance lending panel.
- A wider spectrum of funders and services: the new structure means brokers will have access to the best funders and services to suit the needs of themselves and their clients.
- Superior services: it will enable the group to focus our efforts and investment in one place including sales support, data insights, technology and processing support.
Introducing COG Connect
As part of its commitment to further enhancing services for brokers, the group also launched its proprietary asset finance client management and loan application system at the conference. COG’s core platform has been redeveloped after many years of investment and enhancements, and the result is the most complete, dedicated asset finance processing system in the market. COG Connect simplifies product selection and handles both consumer and commercial asset finance. It includes full product selection logic covering over 9,000 combinations of products and credit policies across the group’s panel of 45 funders. It also has a host of other tools to make brokers’ and customers’ lives easier, including customer self-service, automated compliance, and granular reporting.
“We’re very excited about COG Connect’s capabilities and how it will assist brokers, particularly with transacting consumer business,” says Mark. “It will help future-proof brokers’ businesses, and they will benefit from a raft of further improvements, coming online in early November, and an ambitious ongoing development plan.”
*FY22