Redefining Information Technology
Australian Finance Group's Malcolm Watkins approaches IT
(and life) with a long-term perspective.
by David A. Kelly, July 2007
Malcolm Watkins, Executive Director of Australian Finance Group (AFG), believes long-term strategic planning has helped his firm become Australia's top wholesaler of mortgage finance and no. 2 in the worldwide market. The company, which was founded in 1994, now manages over AU$35 billion of mortgage finance and processes over AU$2 billion in mortgages on a monthly basis. Watkins credits a critical strategic decision in 2002 to invest in Oracle Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as a single enterprise system as the reason the company flourished during its second five years of expansion. More importantly, Siebel CRM is a critical part of the firm's strategic plans for future success.
AFG's Siebel CRM implementation is currently deployed throughout the organization and is integrated on the back end onto Oracle Database and Oracle Financials. Watkins contends that many big lending institutions and banks in Australia envy AFG and wish that they also benefited from having only one platform end-to-end. Watkins says, "We don't have integration issues between multiple technology suppliers."
AFG's Siebel CRM system efficiently links brokers and customers to products from financial services institutions. However, to continue to flourish, AFG realizes it needs to continually invest in technology and people.
Read how over the next five years AFG plans to move its management, sales, and marketing systems from a sales and product emphasis to a customer emphasis. Specific plans call for AFG to leverage new features of Siebel CRM 8.0, such as its task-based interface, the large iHelp system, and enhanced Web services.
The first time Malcolm Watkins saw New York City, it was so big he turned around.
"When we were backpacking around the world, my friend and I wanted to go to Manhattan. But after we saw how big it was, we turned back and took another day to do some planning before heading in," says Watkins. "I grew up in a small town in Australia, so New York City was absolutely huge to me. It was important to think ahead."
Since then, thinking ahead has taken Watkins (and Australian Finance Group, the company he helped to found) far. Australian Finance Group (AFG) is now Australia's No. 1 wholesaler of mortgage finance and is No. 2 in the market worldwide. From humble beginnings in 1994, the company has grown to manage more than AU$35 billion of mortgage finance while processing more than AU$2 billion in mortgages per month.
AFG currently employs 204 people but has a much broader reach, with 2,500 contracted mortgage brokers who use AFG's services to help clients select and purchase all types of financial services, from commercial loans to insurance products. Essentially, AFG is a hub connecting more than 50 major financial and insurance providers to the thousands of brokers (and hundreds of thousands of their customers) linked into AFG's network.
There's no doubt that AFG is a bigger success than Watkins and his cofounders ever imagined. Part of the reason for this has been their ability to plan for the long term and think strategically—abilities that can be difficult for small, rapidly growing companies. For example, a decision five years ago to invest three times their annual profit in Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as a single enterprise system has paid off for AFG.
"We couldn't have survived our second five years of growth if we hadn't made the decision to invest in a tier-one platform like Siebel," says Watkins. AFG's Siebel CRM implementation is deployed across the organization and integrated on the back end into Oracle Financials and Oracle Database. "In fact, today we're the envy of many of the major lending institutions and banks in Australia because we have only one platform end-to-end. We don't have integration issues between multiple technology suppliers."
From taking trips to New York City to building Australia's largest private mortgage company—as well as one of the three largest wholesalers of mortgage finance in the world—Watkins has an ability to think ahead and plan strategically that has resulted in huge dividends. Watkins is planning even more strategic initiatives for AFG's next five years of growth, especially in the area of customer centricity.
Finding Your Passion
Although strategic planning has been important to Watkins' success, his career at AFG hasn't followed a traditional path. AFG was founded by two sets of high school friends who simply didn't want to work for someone else—four men who became passionate about an opportunity to build a business with their own efforts.
After graduating from high school, AFG Managing Director Brett McKeon and Watkins went to college. After a few years of university, Watkins' dentistry courses failed to live up to his expectations, and he and McKeon set off to discover the world. Trading in books for backpacks, the two traveled through Europe and the U.S. for a year and a half before returning to Australia.
Surprisingly, AFG's other two founders did the same thing—in their case, taking off for a year of travel after graduating and working in regular jobs for a year.
