CBA’s Calculators Have Been Off Quickli Since July and Are “Unlikely to Return” This Year. RG 273.162 Asks What Your File Says You Compared

Most brokers found out the way you find out about anything in this job: mid-scenario. You load a client into Quickli, you scan the capacity column, and one of the names you expected to see isn’t producing a number.

Broker Daily first noticed the problem in July 2026, when a warning on the Quickli platform read: “For reasons out of our control, we cannot show CBA’s results. Please speak to your BDM.” Older versions of the CBA calculators remained usable on the platform for a time, and were then also removed. On 27 October, Broker Daily reported that Quickli now expects CBA is unlikely to return to the platform before the end of the year.

That is a long time for a quarter of the home loan market to be missing from the tool that more than half the broker channel uses to shortlist lenders. It is worth being precise about what has changed, because the practical consequences are narrower than the headline suggests — and the compliance consequences are broader.

What is actually paused — and what isn’t

Quickli’s position is that this is procedural. Eric Dill, the platform’s co-founder and co-CEO, told Broker Daily the situation is “a matter of standard process, not a technical issue,” and that “CBA’s calculators are paused while we wait for CBA to complete an internal process.” He said Quickli will “restore CBA’s content as soon as the process is complete,” and that the company does not yet have a confirmed time frame from CBA.

CBA’s position, through an unnamed spokesperson quoted in the same report, is that the bank has not changed any of its processes. The report points brokers to the bank’s own channels, noting that brokers “can refer to CommBroker or their CBA BDM for the latest servicing, policy and product information.”

Both statements are worth reading at face value. Nothing in either suggests a fault, a falling-out, or a change in CBA’s appetite for broker-originated business. Brokers should resist the temptation to read the pause as a signal about the bank’s credit settings, because there is no evidence in front of anyone that it is one.

Dill also confirmed that the rest of the panel is unaffected: “Brokers can still access the other lenders on our panel and continue working on their scenarios.” So this is not an outage. It is a hole in one column of a comparison table that many brokers treat, reasonably, as a first-pass view of the market.

One adjacent housekeeping point: Broker Daily reported in June 2026 that CBA would remove accreditations for brokers who had been inactive for 12 months or who had breached the broker code of conduct. If CBA has been out of your workflow for three months because the tile stopped working, and it was thin in your mix before that, it is worth confirming your accreditation is still live before you promise a client a CommBroker-sourced number.

How big the gap is

Two sets of numbers set the scale. The first is Quickli’s reach. The platform’s own website says it is “used by over 14,000 brokers across Australia,” that it “integrates with around 50 lenders,” and that it “supports tens of thousands of serviceability scenarios every week.” Broker Daily reported in July 2025 that around 12,500 brokers were then using the platform, against just over 22,000 brokers in the market — which put it past half the channel more than a year ago.

The second is CBA’s scale in home lending. CBA’s own full-year results presentation reports home loan market share at June 2026 of 24.4% on the RBA measure and 25.4% on the APRA measure, with home loan balances of $749.2 billion in the group lending table. On any measure, this is the largest home lender in the country.

Broker flow into that book has been rising, not falling. CBA’s presentation puts proprietary origination at 65% for FY26, and its CBA-level fundings mix at 64% proprietary and 36% broker in 2H26, up from 33% broker in both 2H25 and 1H26. That series carries a footnote excluding Bankwest and Residential Mortgage Group.

Put the two together and the practical position is this: for roughly a third of the new lending written into Australia’s largest mortgage book, the fastest cross-lender capacity view available to most of the channel currently returns nothing.

The part that lands on your file

Here is the uncomfortable bit. The pause belongs to two companies. The file note belongs to you.

ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 273 sets out how the best interests duty is expected to work in practice. It does not ask which software you used. It asks what you considered and what you wrote down. A few paragraphs are directly relevant, and they are worth reading rather than paraphrasing:

• RG 273.91(b) ties your recommendation to the consumer’s circumstances, including “the strategies, types of credit product, specific credit products and credit providers you investigate.”
• RG 273.162 is the record-keeping expectation: “we expect you to keep records of how you have acted when providing credit assistance,” covering your inquiries and your consideration and assessment of products.
• RG 273.20 says that “in most instances, you should present consumers with more than one option.”
• RG 273.49 makes clear that the assessment of what is in the consumer’s best interests is a point-in-time assessment.
• RG 273.112 requires that “you must be satisfied that the credit products you can access and recommend are sufficient,” with RG 273.113 leaving panel sufficiency to your judgement.

Read 273.49 and 273.162 together and the exposure becomes clear. A point-in-time assessment is judged on the facts as they stood when you gave the credit assistance — which, right now, includes the fact that the tool you used could not show one of the largest lenders on your panel. If your file note says you compared capacity “across the panel” and the shortlist came out of a screen that silently excluded CBA, the note describes something that did not happen.

There is one more paragraph worth knowing about, with a careful caveat. RG 273.157 says that “product recommendation or aggregator software should not have in-built credit provider or product bias.” That paragraph is addressed at how systems are structured — at the software and aggregator layer — rather than at individual brokers, and an unintended pause while a lender completes an internal process is plainly not in-built bias. But it tells you something useful about how the regulator thinks: the tooling layer is not treated as neutral plumbing. If a tool shapes your comparison set, the shape of that tool is part of the picture.

Separately, RG 273.114 says that if a consumer is interested in a credit provider you cannot access, you should tell them so. That is not quite this situation, and the distinction matters. You can access CBA. You just cannot price it in the same thirty seconds as everything else. That makes the honest version of the client conversation a different sentence — and a much easier one.

This is general information, not compliance advice. Your licensee or aggregator sets the standard you are actually measured against, and if you are unsure how your file notes should read while this persists, that is the conversation to have this week rather than next quarter.

The quieter risk: version drift

The CBA pause is conspicuous, so brokers will adjust to it. The more persistent problem is the lender figures that move while still appearing to work, and October produced several.

NAB’s serviceability calculator moved to V66, mandatory for new home loan applications submitted after midnight AEDT on 23 October 2026, updating Household Expenditure Measure values to align with APRA requirements. Macquarie Bank moved to allowing up to 95% of gross rental income in serviceability for eligible investors from 22 October, subject to a minimum 5% vacancy shading and a minimum 15% deduction for total rental property expenses. And from 26 October, Macquarie’s ApplyOnline liabilities section requires brokers to record whether each liability is partially cleared, fully cleared or unchanged, to include the new limit and balance where a liability is partially cleared, and to state whether cleared liabilities will be paid from loan funds, property sale proceeds or the customer’s own funds.

None of those arrive with a warning banner on a third-party screen. A capacity figure you quoted on 22 October against NAB may not survive lodgement on 27 October, and that has nothing to do with Quickli.

Quickli has never claimed otherwise. Its own help centre has carried a note since April 2024 that “Each lender calc has it’s own little quirks that can often cause user input error between the actual calc and Quickli.” That is a fair description of every aggregation layer in this market. The CBA pause is simply the visible, unmissable version of a condition that is always present: third-party aggregated servicing is an indicative first pass, not the lender’s assessment.

A scenario worth running

A PAYG couple, one income with regular overtime, two dependants, a car loan being cleared from loan funds and a credit card they intend to keep. You load them into Quickli. Eight lenders return a number; the capacity spread across them is tight. CBA returns nothing.

The easy path is to shortlist from the eight, present the top two, and write “compared across panel, [Lender A] offered the strongest capacity and rate combination.” It takes four minutes and it is wrong in a specific way: CBA may well have been competitive on that profile, and the file now records a comparison that did not include it.

The defensible path takes fifteen minutes. You model the eight. You open CommBroker and run CBA’s own calculator on the same inputs. You note the result — competitive or not. Then your file says what you did, your shortlist is genuinely a shortlist, and your point-in-time assessment under RG 273.49 is supported by the only thing that ever supports it: contemporaneous notes.

Eleven extra minutes, on the files where CBA is plausibly in the frame. That is the actual cost of this.

What to review this week

1. Confirm your CBA access. Log into CommBroker, find the servicing calculator, and check your accreditation is current — particularly if CBA has been thin in your mix since July.
2. Change one sentence in your client conversation. Replace “I’ve compared across my panel” with “this is indicative, across the lenders I can model in one place today — I’ll run CBA separately.”
3. Audit your last 20 files where CBA was plausibly competitive. Does the file note describe what was actually considered, or what you would normally consider?
4. Write down your own standard. At what point does a scenario warrant running CBA’s calculator directly? Loan size, LVR, profile type — pick a trigger and apply it consistently.
5. Template the note. One line that records which tool you used, which lenders it could show, and that CBA was assessed separately. Thirty seconds, every file.
6. Brief your support team. PAs and associates may only know that “CBA doesn’t come up” and may be quietly dropping it from shortlists without flagging it.
7. Re-run anything NAB-related quoted before 23 October against V66 before lodgement.
8. Update your Macquarie data entry for the liabilities changes that took effect 26 October.
9. Ask your licensee what standard applies. Aggregator compliance teams may already have a position on tool-gap file notes. If yours hasn’t issued one, ask for it.
10. Never present an absence as a decline. A blank tile is not a credit decision, and a client told “CBA wouldn’t do it” on that basis has been misled.

What to watch next

• A restoration date. Quickli says it has no confirmed time frame from CBA and expects the content is unlikely to return this year.
• Whether this pattern repeats. If one lender’s content can be paused pending an internal process, the same can happen to another. That is an argument for keeping at least one lender’s own calculator in your routine regardless.
• Aggregator guidance. Whether licensees issue a standard for documenting comparison sets while a panel lender is unavailable in third-party tooling.
• CBA’s next result. The channel mix in the 1H27 disclosure will show whether three months off the channel’s default comparison screen moved broker flows at all.