Brokers Told Macquarie the Best Price Only Lands After a Discharge Is Lodged. In ASIC’s Example 11, the Reprice You Win Isn’t Credit Assistance at All

What the survey actually says

Macquarie Equity Research’s 2026 Mortgage Broker Survey, reported by The Adviser on 6 October, has the gap between what lenders charge existing borrowers and what they offer new ones narrowing across the market. On the figures in that reporting, ING and HSBC sit tightest at 11 basis points. Macquarie Bank is a point behind at 12. NAB is on 19, CBA on 21, and Bank of Queensland is the widest of those named at 23.

The same reporting has roughly 30 per cent of customers now renegotiating their rate, up from about 27 per cent, and it cites RBA data putting the market-wide owner-occupier gap between new and existing borrowers at under five basis points. That last number reaches us through the survey write-up rather than a release we could check line by line, so treat it as the report’s characterisation rather than a figure to quote at a client.

On broker-rated competitiveness the spread is far wider than the pricing gaps suggest. ING was rated competitive by 93 per cent of brokers surveyed, Macquarie Bank by 87 per cent and ME Bank by 78 per cent. At the other end, NAB sat at 15 per cent, CBA at 14 per cent and Bank of Queensland at 9 per cent.

The sentence brokers should read twice

Narrowing gaps read like good news. The survey’s verbatim comments explain why the week doesn’t feel that way. One broker put the mechanic plainly:

“Generally hard to get new-to-bank rates for existing clients when doing retention. Only after a discharge is lodged will a bank offer their best rates.”
Anonymous broker, quoted in Macquarie Equity Research’s 2026 Mortgage Broker Survey, via The Adviser, 6 October 2026

Another was blunter about where the client conversation ends up:

“The retention piece is dreadful. The banks are contacting the clients directly and offering them internal refinances to take the broker out of the picture. That’s not OK.”
Anonymous broker, same survey, via The Adviser

Those are brokers’ characterisations of lender behaviour collected in a survey. They are not findings, and nothing in them establishes that any lender has done anything it is not entitled to do — a lender is generally free to contact its own customer and to price its own book. But they describe a sequence that has real consequences for how you run a retention file, and the first one is this: if the competitive number is released by the discharge, then you cannot get the client their best price from the incumbent without first starting the process of leaving it.

That inverts the usual order of operations. Most brokers were trained to price, compare, recommend, then discharge. The behaviour described here asks you to discharge in order to price.

Why a lodged discharge is not a free option

Lodging a discharge to flush out a retention offer only works as a tactic if the refinance behind it is real. In the current buffer environment, that is exactly what brokers in the same survey say they cannot rely on.

APRA requires authorised deposit-taking institutions to apply a buffer over a loan’s interest rate of at least 3.0 per cent unless APRA determines otherwise. That requirement sits in Attachment C of Prudential Standard APS 220, and is explained in APRA’s Prudential Practice Guide APG 223 Residential Mortgage Lending, whose current version is dated 19 June 2025. It applies to the new assessment, not to the loan the client has been paying for years.

Brokers in the survey described the result directly:

“Some existing borrowers can comfortably demonstrate a strong repayment history at their current interest rate, yet may still struggle to refinance to a lower rate because they need to pass a completely new serviceability assessment.”
Anonymous broker, same survey, via The Adviser

Another framed it as the central constraint on refinancing: “The 3 per cent serviceability buffers in a high rate environment is making refinances difficult.” The survey’s wider findings point the same way — borrowing power was cited by 84 per cent of brokers as something customers were seeking, up on a year earlier, against 93 per cent still citing best rates.

There is a second-order point here that is easy to miss. Several brokers in the survey said credit policy is loosening — “more lenders making common-sense decisions, more one-touch unconditionals” — while others said falling volumes have made assessors fussier: “With more time available, relatively immaterial items that would previously have been worked through pragmatically are increasingly being questioned.” Both can be true at once across a panel. It means the serviceability test you should run before lodging a discharge is lender-specific, not a general sense of where the market sits.

Example 10, Example 11, and the line between them

Here is the part that most retention workflows get wrong, and it has nothing to do with pricing.

The best interests duty for mortgage brokers sits in sections 158LA and 158LE of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009, and the conflict priority rule in sections 158LB and 158LF. ASIC sets out both in Regulatory Guide 273 Mortgage brokers: Best interests duty, which identifies those provisions at RG 273.6 and RG 273.9 respectively.

RG 273 then works through two retention scenarios that look almost identical from the outside and land in different places.

In Example 11, a client asks her broker for a more competitive rate on her existing loan. The broker contacts the lender, secures a discount, and tells the client what was arranged — making no other representations or suggestions. ASIC’s conclusion is that no credit assistance has been provided, so the best interests duty does not apply.

In Example 10, a broker runs a home loan “health check”: discusses the client’s objectives and financial situation, surveys available products, concludes the current loan is still the best fit, and recommends staying. ASIC’s conclusion there is that the duty does apply.

The line between them is not the outcome. In both the client keeps her loan. The line is whether you made a suggestion. And RG 273.119 is explicit about what follows once you do: “You must not suggest that a consumer remain in a credit contract without considering whether this would be in the consumer’s best interests.” RG 273.120 adds that where a client is considering refinancing, you should consider the costs of refinancing.

None of this is a substitute for your own licensee’s position. RG 273 is guidance on obligations that sit in the Act, and how your aggregator or licensee expects you to evidence them will be set out in their policy. Where a file is close to the line, that is the conversation to have rather than a judgement call made alone at 6pm.

The asymmetry the conflict priority rule is aimed at

Retention and refinancing usually do not pay a broker the same way. Arrangements vary by lender and aggregator, but as a general shape: a reprice on an existing loan typically generates no new upfront and preserves the trail, while a refinance pays an upfront and, where the outgoing loan is still inside its clawback window, can cost the broker commission already received.

That asymmetry is precisely what the conflict priority rule addresses, and it cuts both ways. RG 273.161 states that if you prioritise maximising or receiving non-consumer sources of remuneration over the interests of the consumer, you will be in breach of the rule. The obvious failure is churning a client into a refinance for the upfront. The less-discussed one runs the other direction, and RG 273 calls it out by quoting the Replacement Explanatory Memorandum: it may be a breach of the duty if the broker suggested the consumer remain in their current home loan when they could refinance to a cheaper product because the broker did not want to incur the clawback liability.

Read against the survey, that is the live risk in a market where the incumbent will match on price once a discharge is lodged. A retention offer that arrives at the eleventh hour is commercially convenient for a broker holding clawback exposure. It may also be the right answer for the client. The conflict priority rule does not ask you to pick the option that pays less. It asks you to be able to show that the payment was not the reason.

What to put on the file this week

A workable sequence for any retention or refinance file where the incumbent is likely to match:

1. Price the market before you touch the discharge form. Establish what the client can actually access elsewhere, so the incumbent’s eventual offer is measured against something real rather than against whatever it volunteers.
2. Ask the incumbent for its best retention number first, in writing. If it will not release a competitive rate without a discharge, record that you asked and what came back. That record is the evidence of why the next step happened.
3. Test serviceability at the new lender, at the 3 per cent buffer, before lodging anything. A discharge lodged behind a refinance that cannot settle is a live risk to the client, not a negotiating tactic.
4. Tell the client what a discharge request actually does — and record that you did. Including that the incumbent may contact them directly.
5. Decide which box the file is in, then file to that standard. Bare reprice with no suggestion, per Example 11, or a recommendation to stay, per Example 10. If you compared and advised, the comparison and the reasoning belong on the record.
6. Where you recommend staying, note why — and note what it wasn’t. The product reasoning should stand on its own terms, independent of your clawback position.

What to watch next

Two threads. The first is whether lender retention conduct toward broker-originated clients draws regulatory attention. ASIC confirmed on 30 September that it will review referrer programs and lender oversight of brokers, with its letter going to bank boards. That review is not about retention pricing, and it would be wrong to read it as such — but it does mean the lender-broker relationship is under active examination.

The second is whether the gaps in the survey keep narrowing. If front-to-back book differentials genuinely compress toward the few-basis-point level, the commercial case for a defensive refinance weakens and more of your pipeline becomes retention work — the kind that, done as a bare reprice, generates no upfront at all. That is a revenue-model question as much as a compliance one, and the survey is the early read on it.