Back-to-back Broker of the Year on stepping off the tools, coaching her team and hiring her former boss’s boss
Katie Thomas (pictured with team, front and centre) was no rookie when she made the move into broking.
By the time she crossed over from the bank side, she had already clocked up 13 years in finance and lending – including time at Westpac – and arrived with a ready-made referral network and client base in tow.
That head start has since turned into a serious haul of silverware. At the 2025 Australian Mortgage Awards (AMAs), Thomas took home Westpac Australian Broker of the Year and NAB Broker of the Year – Regional.
In 2026 she went back to back on the national title, adding Brighten Broker of the Year – Regional and Equity-One Broker of the Year – Productivity for good measure.
See more: Australian Mortgage Awards 2026: Winners gallery
But don’t expect her to take all the credit. “There’s one person standing there accepting an award for probably 20 people behind them,” Thomas says. “The awards really just give receipts to the team that did the work.”
Now the back-to-back Broker of the Year is trading cutting deals for coaching for coaching as Newcastle-based Focus Finance gears up for a national dominance.
Building the plane mid-flight
Ask Thomas what’s behind such a stacked trophy cabinet and her philosophy boils down to something along the lines of: say yes first, work out the details later.
“I’ve been underqualified at every stage, and it works out,” Thomas tells MPA. “I just assume I can do it and then build the plane while I’m flying it.”
These days, that confidence is backed by a long track record. “I back myself to find the answer, find a way, get an outcome – and I have enough evidence now that I do it consistently. So I just think, where’s the limit at this point?”
In fact, Thomas doesn’t buy the idea of a ceiling at all. “Your ceiling is the one you create,” she says. “You’re lying to yourself either way, so you may as well make it a pretty lie – say your ceiling’s sky-high, because you don’t know that.”
Playing it safe, it turns out, just isn’t her style. “It’s addictive – the dopamine hit of living outside your comfort zone.”
Running her own business, rather than working inside a big bank, has given her the room to lean into it. “In corporate, there’s a pretty cookie-cutter box of how they want you to think. But not in my business – I was very comfortable with exactly how I exist.”
That doesn’t mean she thinks she has it all figured out – far from it. But it does mean being self-aware enough to know what she’s really good at while acknowledging her blind spots. As it happens, covering those blind spots is exactly where her newest hire comes in – but more on that later.
Handing over the reins
Stepping off the tools means passing on clients she has worked with for a decade or more. With such a strong team behind her, the handover is the easy part.
Every broker in her team started out as one of her associates, and Thomas has put in the hard yards training them all from scratch over the years. “The transition was seamless. It was more my own emotional process – I’d been a broker for so long, a lender for so long.”
She continues: “I truly love being a broker. But the business had grown to a point where I was becoming the bottleneck – my time was still devoted to being a broker.”
So with her team now lodging about a billion dollars in applications a year, the choice was simple. “I can either stay behind my own files and focus on those clients, or free up time to assist and coach more brokers and help more clients behind them.”
Then there’s the academy. Thomas has turned 20 years of recorded client interviews, coaching sessions and messages into a training platform of roughly 700 modules – essentially, a digital version of herself for the team to learn from. Success leaves clues, as she puts it.
Itchy feet
So why expand now? “Because I’m bored,” Thomas half-jokes, before getting to the real answer.
Her brokers have been at capacity on lead intake for quite some time, she says, with every broker in the team on track to write between $100 million and more than $200 million individually this year.
It’s an industry-wide problem: brokers facilitated a record 81.6% of new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter, according to Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia (MFAA) data compiled by Cotality. Thomas simply can’t train associates up fast enough to keep pace with how fast the broking industry is moving.
Enter Wells. The appointment of former Westpac executive Matt Wells as general manager brings a 28-year Westpac and St.George veteran into the fold – and a familiar face, given he used to be Thomas’s boss’s boss back in the day. How the tables turn.
The pair is a study in opposites. Wells lives and dies by the calendar, and loves structure, processes, performance reviews and keeping tabs on every date. Thomas’s own management style? “Full vibes.” Yet it’s a dynamic Thomas is confident will work.
Vibrant, empathetic and loose
For Thomas, the secret sauce of broking has little to do with home loans. “Forget lending, broking, home loans, investment properties – all of that. We’re in the business of people. People relate to people. That’s it.”
Put on the spot to sum up the Focus Finance culture in three words, she lands on vibrant, empathetic and loose.
Now, with Wells on board, Thomas reckons Focus Finance is primed for what comes next. “We’ve got a great broker team, strong management foundations, great clients, a great referral network. It’s all sitting there ready to go.”
Who knows? Perhaps a three-peat is on the way, but we’ll have to wait another 11 months until the next AMAS to find out.
