The introduction trade is dying#
Five years ago the broker controlled three things: the lender relationship, the document pack, and the credit narrative. APIs, KYC platforms and lender-side AI now do the first two faster than any human team.
What is left — the credit narrative, the structuring choice, the orchestration of multiple capital partners against a single client outcome — is exactly the part that cannot be automated.
Take of the day
“Pure-introduction revenue per case has fallen 23% in 24 months.”
What 'orchestration' actually means in practice#
It means treating each client as a balance sheet, not a transaction. Property finance, business finance and asset finance are surfaced from the same brief. The product mix is selected by outcome, not by the broker's panel.
It means a single underwriting view across all three pillars — so a development sponsor's cashflow gap can be solved with invoice finance, not just an extension to the senior facility.
The economics of unbundling#
Pure-introduction fees are compressing toward zero on simple cases — sub-£500k bridges, plain-vanilla BTL, off-the-shelf asset finance. The lender-direct stack has eaten that work.
Multi-product orchestrated cases — where a single client engagement crosses two or more pillars — earn 2.4x the blended fee, retain at 87% versus 41%, and generate three times the referral activity. The data is unambiguous.
What this means for principals#
Firms that still measure success by lender panel breadth are measuring the wrong thing. The metric that matters in 2026 is products-per-client and outcomes-per-engagement.
The transition is not optional. By 2027 the introduction-only segment of the market will be lender-direct, AI-mediated, and structurally fee-free. The orchestration layer is where the margin lives.