I've always said that there is a fine line between "lenders"/"funders" and "brokers." If you define it as Dave did, then banks aren't lending their own money either, they're lending the deposits that they have.

On this forum, there are a few issues:
1) If you submit to a direct lender and it's rejected, brokers generally don't want it to go elsewhere
2) If a funder/lender can't do it, they can refer you to someone who can
3) Brokers work with multiple options, lenders/funders are more limited, so they underwrite in-house, cuts down the back & forth since they know what they need and don't ask for things that they don't
4) More transparency, less gets lost in translation
5) Contracts are coming from someone at the lender/funder, not through this "other guy" in between
6) You can learn something from funders that brokers can't teach you (but then again, you can't learn much from lenders if you don't know where to go!)
7) Commissions are lowered, despite sometimes the same work going into it [and that's probably the main reason]

At the end of the day, if your "rep" is being paid by the lender/funder and the originating broker is being paid by the lender/funder separate from the "rep", then that may satisfy most of the issues.

I'm all-for co-brokering, that's my main business model. However Dave, you're not direct, nor are you a white label.