ASIC Alleges Up to 70 Comparison Sites Sold Leads to the Highest Bidding Broker. Your Own Panel Claim Sits Under the Same Section

For brokers, the temptation is to file this under “someone else’s problem”. No broker is a defendant. No broker has been accused of anything. But brokers sit at both ends of the claim ASIC is testing. You are the buyer at the end of a lead funnel, and you are also an advertiser who almost certainly makes a comparison claim of your own — on a homepage, a Google ad, a LinkedIn bio, or a one-pager you hand to referral partners.

Section 12DB governs representations about a service. It is not the Best Interests Duty, and it is not the responsible lending framework. It is the consumer-protection provision that asks a simpler question: did the words match the process? That is a question you can answer about your own business today, without waiting for a court.

1. What ASIC has actually alleged

On 18 September 2026, ASIC announced it had commenced proceedings in the Federal Court against Clark Family Pty Ltd (media release 26-221MR). ASIC alleges that through up to 70 websites offering free online assessments for loans and insurance products, the business represented that it would compare rates, quotes and options from multiple insurance providers and lenders and offer tailored options — when, ASIC alleges, consumer enquiries were instead sold through an internal bidding process, with the highest bidding broker receiving the lead.

ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “We allege Clark Family promoted its websites as providing comparisons and tailored options when, in reality consumer enquiries were simply sold to the highest bidder.” In its report of the action, The Adviser also quoted Ms Court as saying that where businesses represent that they compare products or identify options suiting a consumer’s needs, those claims must accurately reflect the service being provided.

ASIC alleges contraventions of sections 12DB and 12DF of the ASIC Act, and is seeking declarations, pecuniary penalties, an adverse publicity order and injunctive relief. The alleged conduct period runs from September 2020 to September 2026.

Two features of the pleaded case matter commercially, regardless of outcome. The first is the alleged conduct window: it runs up to the month of filing, not to some point years ago. If your brokerage has bought digital leads from comparison-styled sites recently, this is not a historical matter in the way enforcement actions usually are by the time they become public.

The second is the adverse publicity order ASIC is seeking. Orders of that kind typically require a business to publish corrective communications. If one were made, the consumers receiving that correction would include people who are now in broker CRMs, some of them settled. That is a client-communication scenario worth thinking about before it arrives, not after.

2. The $19,800 version of the same idea

Three days later, on 21 September, ASIC announced (26-224MR) that Fundo Loans Pty Ltd had paid a $19,800 infringement notice. ASIC’s concern was the claim, advertised on Fundo’s website from 3 April 2023 until approximately 19 September 2025, that it offered “no credit check loans” of up to $5,000 — when, ASIC said, applicants were required to consent to credit checks, and from 1 January 2024 checks were conducted on some applications. The notice was issued under section 12GX of the ASIC Act in relation to section 12DB(1)(e). Fundo paid on 17 September 2026. As ASIC noted, payment of an infringement notice is not an admission of liability.

Put the two matters side by side and the pattern is clearer than either is alone. In each, the alleged problem is not a false product feature or a misquoted rate. It is a description of process that ASIC says did not match the process. “No credit check” against a consent-to-check requirement. “We compare” against an internal auction.

3. RG 234 was rewritten in June — and it names lead generators

Three months before these actions, on 9 June 2026, ASIC reissued Regulatory Guide 234 Advertising financial products and services (including credit). The update folded in enforcement and regulatory action since 2012, consolidated the old RG 53 guidance on past-performance claims into the one document, and withdrew RG 53.

Several parts of the reissued guide read differently once you have the September actions in front of you. RG 234.3 describes who the guide applies to, and it is explicit that a promoter can be a third party — including, in ASIC’s own parenthetical, a credit service provider, an intermediary such as a lead generator, or an agent. Brokers and the businesses selling them leads are both inside the guide’s stated scope.

On comparisons, RG 234.63–68 expects any comparison to be accurate, balanced, current and to have a reasonable basis, and to compare things with sufficiently similar features. On headlines and fine print, RG 234.34 states that the more a qualification is needed to balance a headline claim, the more prominently that qualification should be placed — and that the headline claim must not itself be misleading. RG 234.36 goes further: statements referring a consumer to another page via a link or QR code, or to a document such as a PDS or contract, will not be sufficient to correct a misleading or deceptive headline claim.

RG 234.42 speaks directly to intermediaries promoting products issued by someone else. It says an intermediary should ensure the product features described match current product information, ensure advertised fees and costs are accurately reflected in the relevant materials, and identify where certain features are not available to all consumers. For a broker whose website carries lender rate tables or product tiles, that is a maintenance obligation, not a one-off build task.

The guide also applies to advertising in any medium, including social media (RG 234.5), and notes that while the law applies identically to AI-generated advertising content, the potential for hallucinated or biased output from AI tools may increase the risk of misleading or deceptive advertising. If your brokerage has started drafting social copy with a generative tool, that sentence is the one to put in front of whoever approves it.

4. The claim on your own website

Here is the part that is genuinely actionable. Most broker websites carry a number. Sixty lenders. Forty. “Over 30 lenders on our panel.” The number usually comes from the aggregator’s panel list, because that is where it is easy to find.

But the aggregator’s panel and your accreditations are not the same set. A panel of sixty with eleven accreditations held by the broker who will actually write the loan describes a different service than the headline suggests. Whether that gap matters legally is a question for your licensee and, if needed, your own legal adviser — the point here is that the gap is measurable, and you can measure it before anyone asks you to.

Then there is the second-order problem, and it is the more interesting one. Your marketing claim and your Best Interests Duty file note are two documents describing the same process to two different audiences. The Best Interests Duty sits in Part 3-5A of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 — sections 158LA and 158LE create the duty to act in the consumer’s best interests when providing credit assistance, with the conflict priority rule in sections 158LB and 158LF. ASIC’s guidance in RG 273 expects records showing how you acted, including the consideration, investigation and assessment of the products you recommend (RG 273.162), and documentation of the basis for recommending a product including comparison with other options considered (RG 273.165). RG 273.113 also expects a reasonably representative panel of credit providers.

The fix is usually not to delete the number. It is to make the claim describe the process honestly and in the headline itself, where RG 234.34 says the accuracy has to live. “Access to a panel of sixty lenders, with your options shortlisted from the lenders we are accredited with” is longer, less punchy, and describes what actually happens. Three lenders genuinely compared and documented is a defensible process. A claim of sixty and a file showing three is the thing that is hard to explain.

5. The lead you bought, and the expectation attached to it

The second exposure is quieter, and it is not a legal one so much as an operational one.

When a consumer fills in a form on a comparison-styled website and a broker calls them the next morning, the consumer’s mental model of that call has already been set — by a page the broker has never read. If the page promised a comparison and a tailored match, the consumer may believe the shortlisting work is done, and that the broker calling is the outcome of it.

Nothing about that changes the broker’s obligations. The best interests duty attaches when you provide credit assistance; it does not scale up or down with how the client found you. Notably, RG 273 does not carve out purchased leads or address lead generation at all — the guidance simply applies whenever credit assistance is provided. So the comparison work starts with you on that file, in full, no matter what the landing page said.

What it does change is your first conversation. A client who believes they have already been matched is a client who will not understand why you are asking discovery questions, will read your shortlist as a second opinion rather than the actual recommendation, and may later remember the process as “the website chose this lender”. That is a poor foundation for a file note, and a worse one for a complaint eight months later.

6. What to review this week

This is a one-sitting job for most brokerages. It is not a compliance project.

1. Inventory every comparison claim you make. Homepage, services pages, Google Ads copy, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, email signature, referral-partner one-pagers, the PDF you send new clients. Write each claim down verbatim. Most brokerages find between six and fifteen.
2. Count your actual accreditations. Per broker, not per aggregator panel. Compare that number to the number on your website.
3. Flag every superlative. “Best”, “cheapest”, “lowest”, “sharpest”, “whole of market”. For each, ask what you would produce if asked to substantiate it on a specific file.
4. Check where your qualifications sit. If the accuracy of a claim depends on a disclaimer, RG 234.34 and RG 234.36 are the paragraphs to read: the headline itself must not mislead, and a link to a disclaimer page is not treated as a cure.
5. Read your paid lead sources as a consumer. List every third party you buy leads from. Open their landing pages on your phone and go through the form. Note exactly what the consumer is told they will get.
6. Add the expectation reset to your paid-lead call script and to your file-note template, so it happens by default rather than by memory.
7. Take the list to your licensee. Your aggregator or licensee has a marketing approval standard and, in most cases, a view on lead-source due diligence. Ask specifically whether your claims and your lead sources have been reviewed against the reissued RG 234, not the 2012 version.

7. What to watch next

• Whether the Clark Family matter is heard or resolved, and if penalties are imposed, whether the Court makes the adverse publicity order ASIC has sought. The form of any corrective communication would tell brokers a great deal about how ASIC expects comparison claims to be described.
• Whether ASIC’s attention moves along the funnel. RG 234.3 places both lead generators and credit service providers inside the same definition of “promoter”. The September action was taken against the top of the funnel.
• Whether the industry associations issue channel-specific guidance. At the time of writing, no MFAA or FBAA statement on these actions had been published.
• Aggregator marketing-approval standards. A reissued RG 234 in June is the kind of change that flows into licensee marketing policies on a lag. If yours has not been updated, the gap sits with you in the meantime.

The distance between the headline and the file

Brokers spend a lot of compliance energy on the recommendation and comparatively little on the sentence that brought the client through the door. These two actions are a reminder that the sentence is regulated too, by a different provision, with its own penalties, and that ASIC refreshed the relevant guidance three months before it acted.

The good news is that this is one of the rare compliance exposures you can close in an afternoon, with no system change and no new software. Read your own marketing the way a regulator reads an advertisement — headline first, process second — and then read a recent file note the same way. If both describe the same business, you are in good shape. If they do not, you have found something worth fixing, and you found it yourself.