ING Scraps Clawback on Property-Sale Discharges: What the 1 August Commission Overhaul Means for Your Book

ING will stop clawing back broker commission when a borrower sells the property behind their loan. From 1 August, clawback no longer applies where a loan settling on or after that date is discharged following a property sale between 12 and 18 months after settlement. It arrives alongside a wider overhaul of ING’s commission model — a flat upfront rate, a much higher loan cap, and a trimmed long-tail trail. The FBAA has welcomed it. There is a trade-off, and it is worth doing the maths on your own book.

In this article

• What’s Actually Changing on 1 August
• The Waiver: Reading the 12-to-18-Month Window
• The Flat 71.5bps and the $5m Ceiling
• The Trail Trade-Off After Year Four
• Does the Maths Work in Your Favour?
• Industry Reaction — Including a Dissenting Voice
• Why Now: The Treasury Consultation Backdrop
• What This Means for Brokers
• Your Action List Before 1 August
• The Bottom Line

What’s Actually Changing on 1 August

ING has restructured its broker remuneration across four moving parts at once. Taken individually they look modest; taken together they change the shape of what an ING file is worth over its life.

• Clawback: removed where a loan is discharged after a sale of the secured property, between 12 and 18 months post-settlement.
• Upfront: a flat 71.5 basis points including GST, on every loan, regardless of LVR.
• Upfront cap: the maximum loan amount attracting upfront commission rises from $2 million to $5 million.
• Trail: 16.5 basis points for the life of the loan, but the four-year-plus rate falls from 20bps to 15bps.

All of it applies to loans settling from 1 August. Nothing is retrospective, which matters for how you sequence submissions over the next fortnight.

The Waiver: Reading the 12-to-18-Month Window

The detail that will get quoted is “ING has scrapped clawback.” The detail that matters is the window.

The waiver applies to discharges between 12 and 18 months after settlement, and only where the discharge follows a sale of the secured property. That means:

• A sale-driven discharge inside the first 12 months is still clawed back.
• A refinance to another lender at any point in the clawback period is still clawed back.
• Past 18 months, clawback did not apply in the first place.

So the change carves out a specific six-month band of a specific discharge reason. It is real relief, but it is narrower than the headline suggests, and you should describe it accurately to your team before someone assumes sale-driven discharges are now cost-free from day one.

The Flat 71.5bps and the $5m Ceiling

Moving to a single upfront rate across all LVRs removes a layer of modelling from your commission forecasting. Under tiered structures, a low-LVR refinance and a high-LVR first home buyer file paid differently for the same work. A flat rate is simply easier to predict.

The cap increase is arguably the bigger commercial story and it has been under-reported. Lifting the upfront-eligible loan amount from $2 million to $5 million means that on a $3.5 million file you are now paid upfront on the full amount rather than on $2 million of it. For brokers writing higher-value metropolitan purchases, upgraders, or investor files at the top end, that is a step change in economics on a single deal — and it quietly makes ING more competitive for a segment where the majors have long had an advantage.

The Trail Trade-Off After Year Four

Nothing here is free. The four-year-plus trail rate drops from 20 basis points to 15 — a 25 per cent cut on exactly the loans a mature broker relies on.

This is the classic remuneration trade: more certainty now, less annuity later. Whether it favours you depends almost entirely on the age profile of your book. A broker five years into building a trail book feels this differently to one writing volume today with a book that has not yet aged past four years.

Does the Maths Work in Your Favour?

Run it against your own numbers rather than the industry average. Three questions decide it:

1. How much of your ING book is past four years?

If a large share of your trail income comes from loans older than four years, the 5bps reduction is a real, recurring cut. If your ING book is young, the impact is deferred and the clawback relief is immediate value.

2. How often do your clients sell in the 12–18 month band?

For brokers with a bridging, relocation, or upgrader-heavy client base, sale-driven discharges in that window are common and the waiver is worth genuine money. For a refinance-led book, it will rarely trigger — because refinances are still clawed back.

3. How much high-value volume do you write?

The $2m to $5m cap change is worth more on a handful of large files than the trail reduction costs on many small ones. If you write in that band, the package is likely net positive.

Context for the relief side: an FBAA-commissioned survey previously found eight in ten brokers had been hit by clawbacks in the past year, with nearly half losing more than $10,000. Against that baseline, removing even a narrow band of clawback exposure is not trivial.

Industry Reaction — Including a Dissenting Voice

Money Lounge mortgage broker Maddie Walton summarised the trade-off directly: “While the reduction in trail commission on loans held beyond four years reducing by 25% isn’t ideal, I believe it’s a worthwhile trade off for a fairer clawback policy.”

“Brokers invest significant time and resources into every client, and when a loan is repaid because a customer sells their property, that’s completely outside of our control,” Walton said. “I’d much rather accept a lower trail on long-held loans than continue to carry the risk of being clawed back for something I don’t influence.”

Not everyone agreed. Another broker put the counter-case: “Clawbacks are part of the commercial reality of lending. What we should be talking about is rewarding brokers who retain clients and build quality, long term loan books, not creating incentives that could, at the margin, reward shorter-term behaviour.”

That objection deserves weight. A structure that pays more upfront and less on long-held loans does, at the margin, tilt the incentive toward writing rather than retaining. Brokers who have built their business on retention should read this package with that in mind.

From the aggregator side, outsource Financial chief executive Tanya Sale called it “so encouraging to see a lender the size of ING recognises the realities of the work brokers undertake and move towards a fairer clawback framework.”

ING’s national sales manager for broker, Sergio Delvescovo, framed the waiver around control: “Customers may need to sell a property for a range of reasons, including relocation, changes in family circumstances or other significant life events. In these situations, brokers have often done everything right, yet may still be subject to clawbacks.”

Why Now: The Treasury Consultation Backdrop

The timing is not coincidental. The announcement follows closely on the FBAA’s submission to Treasury’s June 2026 consultation paper on unfair trading practices protections for small businesses — a submission that named clawback, net-of-offset arrangements, channel conflict, referrer arrangements and broker accreditation as areas needing reform.

FBAA chief executive Leo Gagic welcomed the move without declaring the job done, saying ING was “taking an important step in the right direction” and that he hoped the lender would extend the waiver across the full first year, because “brokers shouldn’t be penalised at all for reasons beyond their control.”

Gagic also urged other lenders to follow: “every step forward that makes it fairer for brokers is a good step.” He pointed to ING’s channel parity commitment — that direct-to-customer loans are not priced below broker-channel loans — as a further positive signal.

The read for brokers: with Treasury actively consulting, a first-mover lender changing clawback voluntarily creates competitive pressure. Watch whether a second lender moves before the consultation reports.

What This Means for Brokers

Three practical shifts.

Your ING conversation changes for sale-likely clients. Where a client has flagged they may sell within a couple of years — downsizers, families anticipating relocation, clients in transitional circumstances — ING’s structure now carries less risk for you than a comparable lender’s. That is a legitimate input into lender selection, but it must sit behind the client’s interests, not in front of them.

Best Interest Duty still governs the recommendation. A more favourable clawback structure is a benefit to you, not to the borrower. It cannot be the reason you recommend ING. Rate, features, policy fit and serviceability decide the recommendation; your commission exposure does not. If ING wins the file, the file note should show why it won on client grounds.

Your revenue forecast needs updating. If you model trail income, the four-year-plus change flows through to every projection you have built on ING loans written from August.

Your Action List Before 1 August

1. Check your settlement pipeline. Loans settling on or after 1 August fall under the new structure. Anything settling before does not.
2. Model your book both ways. Estimate the trail reduction against your four-year-plus ING loans, and weigh it against expected clawback relief and the higher upfront cap.
3. Brief your team precisely. Make sure everyone understands the waiver is sale-driven discharges only, in a 12-to-18-month window — not a blanket removal.
4. Review your high-value files. The $5 million cap may make ING viable on deals where it previously was not worth submitting.
5. Keep your BID notes clean. Commission structure changes are exactly the kind of thing a reviewer will probe if your lender mix shifts noticeably from August.
6. Watch the other lenders. If a second lender follows, clawback reform stops being a competitive quirk and starts being an industry expectation.

The Bottom Line

ING has done something lenders rarely do: given up a revenue-recovery mechanism voluntarily, ahead of regulation, and accepted the reputational upside. The waiver is narrower than the headlines imply, and it is paid for out of long-tail trail. But the direction is unambiguous, and the $5 million upfront cap is a genuine competitive move that has been overshadowed by the clawback news.

Whether the package suits you is a maths question, not a sentiment one. Brokers writing high-value volume with a young book come out clearly ahead. Brokers whose income leans on a mature trail book are effectively funding the change.

What to watch: whether a second lender moves before Treasury’s unfair trading consultation reports. One lender acting alone is a marketing position. Two makes it a shift — and it would meaningfully strengthen the FBAA’s argument that clawback is a practice the industry can live without.

Sources: Mortgage Professional Australia — “ING announces major clawback overhaul” (21 July 2026); Australian Treasury — unfair trading practices consultation; Finance Brokers Association of Australia.

Disclaimer: This article is for general information and professional development purposes only. It does not constitute legal, compliance, or financial advice. Brokers should consult their aggregator’s compliance team and, where required, seek independent legal advice regarding their obligations under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 and ASIC’s responsible lending guidelines.