Building Ikaya piece by peace

When South African-born globetrotter Janine Wade (pictured) said goodbye to her adopted home of the UK for good, she wasn’t quite sure how long Australia would actually let her stay. All she had was a one-year working holiday visa on her British passport, and hopefully, a company willing to sponsor her would decide the rest.

She did know one thing, though: she wanted to have her own business at some point, whatever that business may be.

“I wasn’t particularly fussed with having it in finance – it was just that I wanted to have my own business,” says Wade.

That sponsorship search led her, through a UK connection, to industry legend Mario Rehayem, the chief executive of prominent non-bank lender Pepper Money.

Having worked as a business development manager in the UK, Wade assumed that’s the role she’d be slotted into, but Rehayem had other plans. Seeing her potential as a mortgage broker, he built an entirely new role around her. She recalls Rehayem saying, “No, no, I think you can do broker stuff here. I’m going to make a role for you.”

This origin story of an elite, award-winning broker isn’t the most typical one – the profession chose her, not the other way around. But having celebrated the 10th anniversary of her Manly-based mortgage brokerage Ikaya earlier this year, clearly fate got it right this time.

What’s in a name?

By the time Wade eventually decided to move on from Pepper Money, she actually had a different business forming in the background – one built around health, food and fitness, a passion she’d nurtured her entire life.

Broking, she assumed, was a pitstop in a longer journey. But the broking industry had other plans in mind.

Friends and family kept calling, pleading for help buying their first, second or third home. As much as she loved – and still loves – health and fitness, “I really got a kick out of helping people buy their homes and investments – it was just a very big interest of mine. I’ve always loved helping people who don’t have very much, who haven’t come from a very privileged background”.

Wade went all in, launching her own mortgage broking business in Sydney’s affluent Northern Beaches in 2016, thousands of miles away from her native South Africa.

The brokerage’s name, however, carries a piece of Wade’s roots.

“It was something to link me back to my South African heritage. My husband speaks Zulu, and we were chatting about names. He said, ‘Why don’t you call it Ikaya? It means home of peace.’ We dropped the H – it’s actually spelled I-K-H-A-Y-A – so as not to confuse the Australians.”

Making waves

As Wade’s profile grew, recognition through her mortgage aggregator Australian Finance Group (AFG) followed, and it well and truly caught her off guard.

“Winning the New South Wales Champion Broker in 2024 – the year before, it wasn’t even on my radar that I could ever get that,” she recalls. “Then going to the Gold Coast for the first time and winning the Champion Broker for the whole of AFG. Even watching the video back, I thought, ‘No, he’s going to say someone else’s name.’”

Not content with that win, Wade returned in 2025 to scoop up the award once again, making her the first broker to achieve that back-to-back feat.

“Winning it back-to-back was mental, especially for a woman,” she says. “At the AFG top 50 the year before, I looked around and counted maybe five women out of 50 brokers on stage. And then I went on to win it again while I was pregnant.”

Incredibly, following this interview, Wade went on to be crowned AFG Champion Broker (NSW/ACT) in 2026, putting her in the running for another national title at AFG Next, the aggregator’s national conference, from 9–12 November 2026.

The raw numbers are equally impressive. Wade settled $429 million on her own in the 2025–26 financial year – no easy feat considering the number of plates she has spinning at any one time.

“I’m not even working full-time,” she says. “I’ve got three children, so I don’t work five days a week in the office. I work a lot of evenings and some weekends in between.”

Biggest challenge, greatest pride

Recruitment has been both the hardest part of running Ikaya and the thing Wade is proudest of. Watching her sister’s struggles getting back into the workforce after having children shaped her philosophy from day one: bring in capable women who’d been overlooked simply for stepping away to raise a family.

“My first three staff all started that way,” Wade says. It’s meant investing time training brokers from scratch rather than hiring people with existing mortgage experience – a trade-off she’s had to keep defending as the business has grown. “It was also challenging, because I had to invest time training them rather than hiring someone who already had mortgage experience.”

But bringing more women into broking matters to her. Women make up just 27.4% of the broking workforce, according to the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia’s (MFAA) latest industry research. She recalls being presumed to be someone’s PA rather than an award-winning broker at various industry events – although thankfully, these misconceptions have decreased over time.

None of this fazed her too deeply, as she has been holding her own around blokes since childhood. “Even at school, I had more guy friends than I did girlfriends because I was very into off-road motorbikes,” she says, amused.

Her dad built the family a go-kart, and she’d race it down the street against the boys next door. She skateboarded too, and at 13 was already the unofficial (and entirely unlicensed) designated driver on school trips.

But female success, she suspects, often gets undersold. “I think women are brought up not to say it outright. A guy would say, ‘I settled $429 million.’ I’d just say, ‘Yeah, I had a great year’ – and that would be it.”

Read more: MPA spotlights 77 female leaders driving growth across Australia’s broking industry

A decade in, Ikaya has grown to around 15 staff across Sydney and the Philippines, mirroring a wider trend of brokers turning to offshore support teams as they scale. The next phase is promoting from within – training credit analysts into broker roles so she can step back into more of a mentoring role herself.

As luck would have it, one of Wade’s three children gate-crashed the Zoom call just as she was discussing the trials and tribulations of being a business owner, mum, mentor, rugby coach and tennis obsessive. She deftly handled the welcome interruption with the grace of someone who had been there, done that a hundred times before. There will undoubtedly be another hundred more.