Speaking at a conference this week, TD’s Devon Ajram, Vice President of Broker Services, announced that real-time pricing will go live in the broker channel on Tuesday.
TD’s real-time pricing—already available to its Mobile Mortgage Specialist (MMS) team since October—will now be extended to the broker channel, putting brokers on equal footing with TD’s other sales channels.
“You’ll effectively have parity with our retail and MMS channels,” said Ajram. “You’ll have instant rate decisioning at your disposal… so that you only get one commitment issued.”
He confirmed that more details will be shared by the bank in the coming week.
“My entire leadership team is going to be very engaged with everybody across the country to make sure what we’re doing—and what we’re transforming from a pricing perspective—is clearly understood,” he said. “But the benefits are very clear.”
Ajram acknowledged that the previous model—where brokers often found themselves disadvantaged compared to TD’s other sales teams—wasn’t working.
“What we realized quite quickly is this idea of trying to impose rules on 15,000 brokers, 20,000 branch employees, another 1,200 MMS, just didn’t make any sense whatsoever,” he said.
TD is also introducing a professional policy to the broker channel later in April. Designed to help brokers serve clients with complex credit or high-earning professions, it’s a policy already available in TD’s other channels.
“I’m happy to share that… we’re going to be introducing a professional policy to the broker channel—finally,” Ajram said. “That’ll be another tool in your toolbox.”
Brokers say the change is overdue
Brokers say the move is a positive one—and a long time coming.
“Most brokers recognize that banks who play in the broker space have their own models… and they compete with their own internal sales forces,” said Leigh Graham, mortgage broker and co-owner at The Mortgage Professionals. “That said, there shouldn’t be competitive pricing among different sales sources from the same brand. Very simply, there just should not be.”
He also noted how the old structure created uncertainty at the start of a deal. “Brokers selling TD products don’t necessarily know what price they’re going to end up with at the start of a transaction,” Graham said. “It’s good to see it’s being acknowledged, and we look forward to improved competition and transparency across all of TD’s sales platforms.”
Clinton Wilkins, team leader at Clinton Wilkins Mortgage Team, said the changes could also have a real impact on both pricing and compensation strategies.
“There’s been some disparity issues, and I think this is very common with all bank lenders,” he said. “You could see different pricing online, through a mobile mortgage specialist, in a branch, or through the broker channel—and customers didn’t understand why.”
In TD’s case, Wilkins said brokers were often at a disadvantage, with rates as much as 20 to 50+ basis points higher than other channels, “Which is a lot to swallow,” he said.
He also pointed to TD’s practice last year of frequently repricing files manually through pricing exceptions—sometimes offering up to 100 basis points off the rate sheet, with no impact on broker compensation. “They were basically buying business last year,” he added. “I think some of that capital was originally earmarked for the U.S. acquisition they ended up pulling the plug on, and they just redirected it into the Canadian mortgage market.”
With real-time pricing in place, Wilkins expects more clarity going forward. “I think now what we’re going to see is we’ll actually know what the ceiling and floor is with them.”
Chad Wilson, broker-owner at Ideal Mortgage Solutions, agreed that the lack of upfront pricing clarity has long been a pain point for brokers.
“Under the previous TD structure, the pace of approval on the rate requests was not in line with the pace of the market,” he said. “Not having clarity on rate up front really hinders the broker’s ability to plan with clients.”
Wilson added that the new approach should lead to both volume growth and operational gains. “I do believe the changes will have an immediate impact on TD’s origination volumes, as well as their efficiencies in the broker channel—specifically funding ratios.”
A deeper challenge: channel conflict and customer experience
John Webster, former head of Scotia Mortgage Authority, said TD’s changes reflect broader issues that major lenders face when trying to balance multiple distribution models.
“You can’t treat a customer differently because of what door they came in on a rate basis,” he said at the CMBA conference on Thursday. “That’s a bad customer experience, a bad outcome. Bad for the consumer, bad for the lender, bad for the shareholder.”
Webster, former CEO of Maple Trust, who led its integration into Scotiabank following its acquisition in 2006, said managing internal competition between branch, mobile, and broker channels has always been a complex challenge—and one that takes years to solve.
“It took three years,” he said. “I had to offer a Maple product, they had Scotia Express [Scotia’s online mortgage hub, eHOME] that had to offer the Scotia product with different features that weren’t available to brokers, and then the branches were hostile to everyone.”
To help manage the channel conflict, Scotia adopted “rules of engagement,” including a first-touch policy to reduce overlap between teams.
Still, Webster believes this tension is far from resolved across the industry.
“This is sort of silly season right now,” he said. “But it will right-size itself. Eventually, you can’t sustain the practice of charging different rates to consumers. It’s going to come back and bite you.”
He added that while the broker channel has higher origination costs, it’s still one of the most effective ways to bring in new customers—particularly on the purchase side.
“If you want to bring new customers to an institution, and if you want to do purchases, the best place—the only place—you can have success, in my view, is in the broker channel.”
A signal of long-term commitment
Ajram emphasized that these changes aren’t just about solving past frustrations, but about demonstrating TD’s continued investment in the broker channel.
“I hope you see this as a commitment that TD is demonstrating to the channel,” he said. “We invest meaningfully here. We’re here for the long haul.”
He added that the shift to real-time pricing and the introduction of a professional policy are part of a broader strategy to reassert TD’s competitiveness in the mortgage space.
“I hope it solves most of the challenges that you’ve faced with TD,” Ajram said. “You’re an important part of what we do to drive the business, and I’m really excited to compete again—ferociously—in the market.”
Wilkins called the change a welcome and overdue step, but also voiced cautious optimism.
“I think my only caution would be that, as we know, strategies can change with the bank very rapidly in a pendulum swing,” he said. “I hope there will be good uptake, and I do hope that even the floor and the ceiling are at parity, and that we can control the pricing the customer is going to be offered.”
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Last modified: March 30, 2025