Your broker notes aren’t for you.
They’re for someone who has never met your client, doesn’t know their story, and has nothing to go on except what you write down. That’s the credit analyst. And most of the MIR points, the extra document requests, the policy questions that slow a deal down, come back to one thing: you wrote your notes as the broker, not as the person who has to assess the file.
Two people looking at the same deal
When you sit with a client, you build up all of this knowledge without even trying. You know their goals, their situation, why the numbers look the way they look. You’ve built rapport. You trust them.
The credit analyst has none of that. They know only what’s in front of them: the documents you’ve loaded and the notes you’ve written. If it isn’t on the page, it doesn’t exist for them.
That’s the whole gap. You’re assessing the client. They’re assessing the file.
“It looks like a duck…”
As a broker, if something looks obviously fine, you’ll submit it and move on. It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
Credit can’t work that way. Their position is: it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, but I need proof it’s a duck. Not because they’re being difficult. Because they’re not allowed to assume.
Here’s a real one. A client’s payslip shows a salary sacrifice deduction marked “voluntary”. To you, that’s obvious, it says so right there. To credit, it isn’t confirmed until someone states it. So you write it in your notes: “I note the payslip shows a salary sacrifice deduction marked voluntary. This is voluntary and can be stopped. I note employer super is also shown as paid on the payslip.” Two sentences. Ten seconds. And it removes an MIR before it’s ever raised.
“Credit analysts never read broker notes anyway”
I hear this one constantly, and it isn’t true.
When a credit analyst calls me with a question that’s already answered in my notes, my first question back is: did you read my broker notes? Because I spent real time writing them, and the answer is right there. More often than not, when I do get an MIR, it opens with “I note in your broker notes you have said”, which tells me plainly that they were read. And on the complex files, the ones that go straight through to formal with no MIR at all, that’s not luck. That’s a credit analyst who had everything they needed on the page and no reason to come back and ask.
Some analysts don’t read them. Credit analysts are people, and not everyone is great at their job, same as brokers, same as any industry. But writing off broker notes because of the odd analyst who skips them costs you every deal where a good analyst would have read every line.
Credit is about risk, not the story
It’s not “do I like this client” or “does their situation make sense to me”. It’s “what is the risk of lending this money to this person, and can I prove it’s lower than it looks”. The lower the provable risk, the more likely the deal gets lent. The higher, the less likely.
Write like you’re the one deciding
Before you submit, sit in the credit seat. Forget everything you know about the client and look only at the paper. What would you need to know? What would you need proven, not just claimed? Answer those questions in your notes before anyone has to ask them out loud, in enough detail that a credit analyst could hand your file to a five-year-old and still not get a question back.
It’s the same discipline behind the result one of our graduates already gets from lenders: “one to two touch formal approvals,” as Tegan Saleh from Complete Finance Management puts it. That’s not a turnaround promise. It’s what happens when the file was built to be assessed, not just submitted.