In credit brokerage, a full working day does not automatically mean a productive one. A single application can require hours of analysis, comparisons between banks, documents requested and resubmitted, and discussions with both the client and the bank. If the financing does not ultimately go through, some of that work does not translate into an economic result.
For a client looking for a mortgage to buy a home, a credit broker helps bring order to the offers, paperwork and questions involved. What types of income will a bank accept? Why can two loan simulations look so different? What happens if the first financing option is not approved? For the professional on the other side of the table, the same process also has an economic dimension: how much work can they take through to completion without compromising service quality?
Bayer Credit explains, for example, that its brokerage service is free of charge for clients and that the company is paid by the bank after the loan is disbursed. By then, the analysis and work on the application have already been carried out. This is where the difference lies between a schedule full of enquiries and activity that results in completed loans.
Bayer Credit is a nationwide credit broker, active since 2007 and specialising in mortgages for home purchases. It is also a founding member of the Romanian Association of Credit Brokers.
A broker familiar with self-employment income will know more quickly what needs to be checked and which banks may offer applicants with that profile a better chance of approval. Another broker may know construction financing, dividend income or applications involving several sources of income particularly well. Clear procedures can reduce repeated requests for documents, while technology can shorten the time needed to compare bank offers.
For clients, all this can mean fewer uncertainties and an application that is easier to follow. For brokers, it can free up time for other cases. A large team can generate and handle more enquiries, but it also requires recruitment, training, coordination and tools. A more compact team may have less geographical coverage but higher activity per professional. The two models do not automatically produce the same results.
An analysis by Bayer Credit of 2025 results compared 13 mortgage brokerage companies with annual turnover of at least €1 million. For each company, it divided annual turnover by the number of designated representatives registered at year-end. The results ranged from approximately RON 133,000 to almost RON 470,000 per representative, a difference of around 3.5 times between the extremes.
“Credit brokerage is learned by working on actual cases, not simply by being part of a network. A professional who consistently handles a high number of cases encounters different types of income, properties, and circumstances, and develops the instincts needed for more complicated applications. When a network is very large but activity per person remains low, practical experience accumulates more slowly. Productivity per professional does not, by itself, tell us how good a broker is, but a steady volume of cases keeps that professional sharp and helps them respond better when an unusual case arises,” says Dragoș Nichifor, founder of credit brokerage company Bayer Credit.
The indicator should be read for exactly what it is: company turnover relative to the size of its network. It is not a broker’s salary, the company’s profit or the amount personally earned by each professional, and it cannot measure the quality of service on its own. Differences may reflect the average value of brokered loans, remuneration structures, the activity level of representatives or how each company is organised. The comparison makes one point clear: the number of people in a network does not, by itself, show how much that network generates per professional.
Bayer Credit’s study on the credit brokerage market in 2025–2026 shows that the number of individuals identified within brokerage networks increased from 1,478 to 1,963 in just one year, an increase of 32.8%.
At the same time, National Bank of Romania data for the first half of 2026 show an opposite trend in new mortgage lending in lei: the volume exceeded RON 27 billion but was 8.5% below the level recorded in H1 2025. The series also includes renegotiations of existing contracts. The two statistics do not measure the same thing and cannot be used to calculate an “average income per broker” directly. Taken together, however, they raise a natural question for the industry: where will the activity needed to support these larger networks come from?
One possibility is to capture a greater share of credit distribution: more clients choosing to work through a broker instead of going directly to a bank. Another is higher productivity: more completed applications, larger-value loans, or less time lost in stages that can be standardised and automated.
In practice, two models are likely to become increasingly distinct. Some companies will continue to rely on large networks and broad geographical coverage, with more people and more points of contact with clients. Others will seek to grow through more compact teams, greater experience per professional, technology, and higher productivity. Neither model guarantees success on its own.
But in an industry where the number of professionals has increased by nearly one third in a single year, the sheer size of a network is likely to say less and less.
What will increasingly matter is how much each person within that network can produce — and the level of quality at which they can do it.
