For years, the easiest prediction to make about finance broking was that technology would eventually make the broker unnecessary. Comparison sites would make rates transparent. Digital lenders would make applications effortless. Open banking would remove paperwork. Artificial intelligence would do the analysis. Once borrowers could see every option and apply in a few clicks, what exactly would be left for the intermediary to do?
The Australian market is producing a rather awkward answer to that prediction. In the June quarter of 2026, mortgage brokers facilitated 81.6 per cent of all new residential home lending, the highest share ever recorded. Eight years earlier, their share was 53.9 per cent. At the same time, more mortgage brokers are moving into commercial and asset finance, business credit is growing strongly, and financial institutions themselves are automating more of the work once performed manually by credit teams.
The broker is not disappearing. But the job is changing.
The old value proposition was largely built around access: access to lenders, products, rates and lending policy. The emerging value proposition is broader. It is about helping people and businesses navigate a financial system that is becoming faster, more fragmented, more automated and, in some respects, harder to judge.
Finance is getting easier to access and harder to navigate
One of the paradoxes of modern finance is that more transparency has not necessarily produced more simplicity. A borrower can compare hundreds of products online, yet still struggle to work out which lender will actually accept their income structure, how a particular policy applies to their circumstances, or what the trade-offs are between rate, flexibility, speed and certainty.
That helps explain why broker use has risen even as banking has become overwhelmingly digital. The latest Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA) data shows brokers arranged $139.08 billion of new home lending in the June 2026 quarter alone. Deloitte‘s 2025 study of the sector found that surveyed brokers were accredited with an average of 23 lenders and could access as many as 65 through aggregator panels. More importantly, 72 per cent of broker business came from repeat customers or customer referrals. That is not the pattern you would expect from a service valued only for comparing interest rates.
The broker’s role has already moved upstream and downstream. Upstream, more time is spent educating clients, interpreting lending criteria and helping them prepare before an application is lodged. Downstream, brokers are increasingly reviewing existing loans, repricing, refinancing and staying involved after settlement. Deloitte found brokers were spending around 11 per cent of their time educating and preparing clients for mortgage applications, while successful repricing produced an average reported rate reduction of 0.35 percentage points.
In other words, the work is moving from finding a loan to managing a financing decision.
The mortgage is becoming one part of a much bigger relationship
The more interesting shift may be what happens beyond residential mortgages.
Commercial and asset finance are still smaller parts of the broker channel, but they are becoming increasingly important. Deloitte found 13 per cent of surveyed brokers were commercially focused, defined as writing at least a quarter of their settlements in commercial lending. Among commercially focused brokers, more than half reported growth in commercial loans over the previous three years, and the average commercial loan was around $750,000 compared with an average residential loan of just over $500,000.
Separate MFAA data has shown the proportion of mortgage brokers also writing commercial loans continuing to rise. In the six months to September 2024, 31.54 per cent of mortgage brokers wrote commercial loans, up from 30.66 per cent in the prior six-month period, with the number of brokers doing so rising 21 per cent year on year.
The macro environment supports that direction. RBA data shows year-ended business credit growth reached 10.8 per cent in June 2026, while the value of new business lending for property purchases reached $27.2 billion in the June quarter, up 18.9 per cent on a year earlier. The Reserve Bank has also noted that lenders’ appetite for business lending remains strong, including among non-bank and private credit providers, with more automated approval processes expanding access for some smaller businesses and self-employed borrowers.
For brokers, this opens a much wider field of play. A client who first appears needing a home loan may later need finance for a vehicle, equipment, a commercial property, working capital or a business acquisition. An SME owner may have personal and business borrowing needs that are impossible to separate neatly. The opportunity is not simply cross-selling. It is recognising that a client’s financial life does not arrive in product silos.
AI will remove work from broking without removing the broker
AI is likely to accelerate this shift because much of the administrative work surrounding credit is highly automatable.
Banks are already testing generative AI in credit decisioning, early-warning systems, document analysis, credit memo drafting and customer engagement. McKinsey’s survey of 44 financial institutions found 52 per cent had made generative AI a priority in credit, although full deployment remains rare. More advanced agentic systems are being designed to work across the lending journey: notifying relationship managers about new applications, preparing personalised client communications, transcribing conversations, surfacing relevant documents and producing post-meeting action lists.
Brokers are following the same path. Deloitte found digital signing was already used by 84 per cent of brokers, CRM systems by 77 per cent and cybersecurity tools by 70 per cent. Looking ahead, 34 per cent planned to adopt Open Banking or Consumer Data Right tools, while 32 per cent planned to implement generative AI.
The temptation is to view this as a substitution story. I suspect it is more useful to see it as a compression story. Technology compresses the time required for collection, verification, comparison, documentation and communication. That leaves a larger share of the broker’s time available for the things that are harder to automate: diagnosing what the client is really trying to achieve, challenging assumptions, explaining trade-offs, managing uncertainty and taking responsibility for the recommendation.
A Melbourne broker named Nick gave me a small example of what that can look like. When rates move, he cannot personally call a thousand clients, and many younger clients do not want a phone call anyway. So he records short voice memos: personal enough to feel human, asynchronous enough not to interrupt the day, and scalable enough to send ten or fifteen in twenty minutes. It is a modest use of technology, but it captures the point. The goal is not to automate the relationship. It is to use technology to make the relationship easier to sustain.
The new competitor may not be another broker
There is another reason the broker’s role will need to expand: the customer interface itself is changing.
Comparison platforms such as Craggle already put ‘Chat with Craggle AI’ beside ‘Speak with a Broker’. Younger customers are also much less attached to incumbent institutions. Finder survey data reported in late 2025 found 18 per cent of Gen Z respondents had switched savings accounts in the previous six months, compared with 7 per cent of Gen X and 4 per cent of Baby Boomers. The same cohort is comfortable maintaining relationships with multiple financial providers rather than treating one bank as the centre of their financial life.
That behaviour matters because AI agents could make switching and comparison easier still. A future customer may not begin with a bank website or broker portal at all. They may begin with a financial assistant that knows their income, expenses, assets, debts and goals, then asks the market to respond.
For a broker, the risk is obvious. If your value is simply access to information, AI can erode it quickly. If your value is helping a client interpret competing options, deal with unusual circumstances and make a consequential decision with confidence, the role looks much more durable.
When information becomes abundant, judgement becomes scarce.
Trust becomes more valuable as verification becomes harder
There is a second, less comfortable reason for the broker’s role to evolve: technology is making financial fraud easier as well as finance faster.
In August 2026, AUSTRAC revealed that Operation Claw, conducted with ten major banks, had identified potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in suspected fraudulent mortgage loans. Fake payslips, company documents and other materials were used to support applications, and banks warned that generative AI had made convincing fakes dramatically easier to produce. AUSTRAC said the same warning signs were found across banks covering the vast majority of Australia’s mortgage market.
The response points towards a broader change in financial infrastructure. Instead of relying on a PDF payslip that can be fabricated, lenders are pushing for consent-based access to verified tax data. The federal government has committed funding to improve the Consumer Data Right and explore sharing ATO information for income verification.
This matters for brokers because trust is increasingly being built through both relationships and provenance. Who supplied this information? Is it verified? Was it altered? Does the borrower understand what has been submitted on their behalf? The broker of the future may spend less time gathering documents and more time overseeing the integrity of the data flowing between client, lender and platform.
Regulation will become more uneven, not less
Diversification also introduces a complication: not all credit is regulated in the same way.
Mortgage broking for consumers sits inside a mature regulatory regime shaped by responsible lending rules, the Best Interests Duty and extensive disclosure and record-keeping obligations. Commercial lending and asset finance can sit outside parts of that framework when the predominant purpose is business or investment. The distinction matters increasingly as brokers broaden their services.
The MFAA has recently reminded brokers that asset finance can be regulated or unregulated depending on purpose. At the same time, private credit and specialist non-bank lending are growing, creating more options for business clients but also increasing the need for due diligence.
On the lender side, APRA is trying to improve competition by reducing unnecessary regulatory burden for small and medium-sized banks. Its current reform program includes a more proportionate three-tier banking framework and efforts to simplify some accreditation and licensing processes. More viable lenders should, in principle, mean more choice for brokers and clients. But more choice also increases the need for expertise.
The broker business model is shifting from transaction to lifetime value
This may be the biggest commercial implication for brokerages. A business built mainly around acquiring a customer, settling one loan and then finding the next lead is expensive and increasingly vulnerable. A business that stays close to a client across home lending, refinancing, investment property, asset purchases and business finance has a very different economics.
The Deloitte research already hints at this. Repeat clients and customer referrals account for nearly three quarters of broker business. The strongest asset a brokerage may therefore possess is not its product panel. It is the accumulated trust, context and permission built across years of client decisions.
Technology can make that asset more useful. A good CRM can identify a client whose fixed rate is expiring, whose business may need equipment finance, or whose lending structure has not been reviewed for several years. AI can help prepare the outreach and analyse the options. But the commercial advantage comes from having a relationship strong enough that the client wants the conversation in the first place.
That is why diversification should not be treated as a menu of extra products. The more powerful shift is from being a mortgage broker to becoming a finance broker in the fullest sense: someone who understands the client’s evolving borrowing needs across personal and business life.
The future broker will do less processing and more interpreting
The next decade will almost certainly remove friction from finance. Applications will become faster. Data will flow more easily. Credit assessment will become more automated. AI will narrow product sets, draft documents and flag anomalies. In some simple cases, the customer may need very little human involvement at all.
But easier transactions do not necessarily produce easier decisions.
A first-home buyer still has to decide how much debt feels prudent. A business owner still has to weigh cash flow against an equipment purchase. A commercial borrower still has to choose between speed, structure, price and flexibility. A self-employed client still has to navigate a system that may interpret their income very differently from a salaried employee. And as the number of lenders, products and automated recommendations grows, someone still needs to make sense of the options.
That is where the broker’s work is heading. Not towards extinction, and not towards a romantic return to purely human service. Towards a hybrid role in which technology handles more of the mechanics while the broker carries more of the interpretation, judgement and relationship.
The industry began by helping borrowers find loans. Its next chapter may be about helping people and businesses make better financing decisions across an increasingly complex financial life.
Michael McQueen is a globally recognised trend forecaster, change strategist and keynote speaker.
A bestselling author of 10 books, Michael’s latest release was named by Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant as one of the top five must-read new leadership books. He is a sought-after media commentator, with his insights regularly featured in Forbes, The Guardian, and CNN.
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NOTES
Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia. “Mortgage Broker Market Share Reaches Record 81.6%.” September 3, 2026. https://www.mfaa.com.au/news/mortgage-broker-market-share-reaches-record-81-6
Deloitte Access Economics. The Value of Mortgage and Finance Broking 2025. Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia, February 10, 2025.
Reserve Bank of Australia. “Financial Aggregates June 2026.” July 31, 2026. https://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/frequency/fin-agg/2026/fin-agg-0626.html
Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Lending Indicators, June Quarter 2026.” August 14, 2026. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/finance/lending-indicators/latest-release
Reserve Bank of Australia. “Resilience of Australian Households and Businesses.” Financial Stability Review, March 2026. https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/fsr/2026/mar/resilience-of-australian-households-and-businesses.html
Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia. “Brokers Seize Opportunity to Strengthen Commercial and Asset Finance Skills.” October 14, 2025. https://www.mfaa.com.au/news/brokers-seize-opportunity-to-strengthen-commercial-finance-skills
McKinsey & Company. “Banking on Gen AI in the Credit Business: The Route to Value Creation.” July 8, 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/banking-on-gen-ai-in-the-credit-business-the-route-to-value-creation
Yeates, Clancy. “The Disloyal Generation That Has Banks Scratching Their Heads.” Sydney Morning Herald, December 29, 2025.
Yeates, Clancy. “‘Frighteningly Easy’: How Fake AI Payslips Fuel Mortgage Fraud.” Sydney Morning Herald, August 24, 2026.
Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. “APRA’s Plans to Support Small and Medium-sized Banks.” October 30, 2025. https://www.apra.gov.au/news-and-publications/apras-plans-to-support-small-and-medium-sized-banks
Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia. “Personal Loans and Asset Finance: A Reminder on NCCP Obligations.” June 23, 2026. https://www.mfaa.com.au/news/personal-loans-and-asset-finance-a-reminder-on-nccp-obligations
