Brokers now write more than 80 per cent of Australian residential home loans. At the MFAA National Conference in Melbourne on 22 July, four industry leaders used a panel on the future of broking to deliver an unusually blunt message: that share is not a trophy, it is a position that has to be defended, and the single biggest threat to it is standing still. “It’s ours to lose,” Macquarie’s head of broker sales told nearly 1,000 attendees.

Key Takeaways

  • MFAA CEO Anja Pannek named “standing still” and “resting on our laurels” as the biggest risk to the industry’s dominance — ahead of AI.
  • Macquarie’s Wendy Brown on the 81 per cent: “it’s ours to lose.” She has been in the industry since broker share was 7 per cent.
  • Steven Bourne argued the transaction is now only 20 per cent of a broker’s value — 80 per cent sits before and after settlement.
  • Clients arrive far better informed, which means brokers must be skilled enough to push back on a client’s own research.
  • Canada operates at roughly 35 per cent broker share and competes explicitly on professional advice and certification.

In this article

The Panel and the Warning

The MFAA National Conference ran on 22 July at Centrepiece Melbourne Park under the theme “Built on Trust. Ready for Tomorrow,” drawing close to 1,000 attendees. The future-of-broking panel featured:

  • Anja Pannek — MFAA CEO (association perspective)
  • Steven Bourne — The Lending Association CEO (broker perspective)
  • Wendy Brown — Macquarie Bank head of broker sales (lender perspective)
  • Lauren van den Berg — Mortgage Professionals Canada CEO (international perspective)

The discussion covered rising consumer expectations, technological acceleration, business model pressure and regulatory change. What made it notable was the consistency of the warning across four very different vantage points.

“It’s Ours to Lose”: Reading the 81 Per Cent

Wendy Brown put the market share position in historical perspective, and the framing is worth quoting in full.

“Brokers are advocates to ensure the clients get the best outcome. And they’re interpreters… interpreting a need to turn it into an outcome,” Brown said. “But the big thing with broker market share, is that it’s ours to lose. I’ve been in the industry for a very long time — since it was 7 per cent of the market share — so we’ve come on that journey together. But it’s ours to lose… we need to keep that consistency of relationship, advocacy, and interpretation to keep that 81 per cent.”

The journey from 7 per cent to 81 per cent took decades of incremental trust-building. The point Brown is making is that share won that way can be lost the same way — not in a single competitive shock, but through a slow erosion of the service standard that earned it.

“Complexity Is a Broker’s Friend”

Anja Pannek addressed the AI question head-on, and her answer was more nuanced than reassurance.

“There’s a famous line in our industry that ‘Complexity is a broker’s friend’,” Pannek said. “I think what we’ve seen over the last few years is that whether the economy is thriving and booming… do you know what people want? They want a hand. They want someone they can trust. They want someone to help navigate them through it… Australians are not choosing how to get finance. What they are actually choosing is they’re choosing help, judgement, and they’re choosing someone that they can trust.”

Asked to name the greatest risk to the sector — with audience polling showing widespread concern about AI — Pannek did not name technology.

“As information becomes easier to access and faster, the human parts of broking are going to become more visible and more valuable. Empathy, reassurance, judgement as well,” she said. Her named risk was complacency: “standing still” and “resting on our laurels.”

The 20/80 Shift: Where Broker Value Now Sits

Steven Bourne offered the panel’s most concrete reframe of the broker role, and it is the one most likely to change how you structure your week.

“Just getting the transaction done is no longer enough. That was enough 10 years ago… I actually think that those days are gone,” Bourne said. “Being a broker now is only 20 per cent getting them through the transaction. But 80 per cent sits before the transaction (getting them mortgage ready) or after the transaction (post-settlement).”

If that ratio is right, most brokerages are structured backwards. Processes, technology spend and staff time are typically organised around the submission-to-settlement window — the part Bourne says accounts for a fifth of the value.

The pre-transaction work is getting clients mortgage-ready: credit repair, deposit strategy, structuring, serviceability improvement, timing. The post-settlement work is annual reviews, repricing, equity conversations, life-event responses. Both are where retention and referrals are actually generated.

Bourne added that as credit advice becomes more specialised and time-consuming, brokers will likely need to go deeper into a speciality and grow back-office support.

The Informed Client and the Skill of Pushing Back

Bourne also flagged a shift in who walks through the door.

“The consumer’s never been better informed when they arrive. So, what we were dealing with five years ago, or maybe even two or three years ago, I think is very different to when consumers come in the front door,” he said.

“I believe that our brokers have got to be better skilled, and they’ve got to be ready to push back… a client will come in and will have done their research and they go, ‘I know what I want. I’ve got the rate. I’ve got the lender,’ but they actually don’t understand the nuances of what happens with the policy or the lender or the process.”

This is a real skills question. A broker who simply executes what a well-researched client requests is an order-taker, and an order-taker is exactly what software replaces. A broker who can respectfully explain why the client’s chosen lender will decline their file on a policy nuance is providing advice — and demonstrating the Best Interest Duty in the process.

Multi-Person Broking and the Lender Systems Gap

Wendy Brown identified an operational blocker that has not had enough attention. Broker businesses increasingly run on teams — parabrokers and loan administrators working files alongside the broker — rather than one person writing a loan start to finish.

Brown flagged that more lenders need to accommodate “multi-person operations” by giving support staff access to loan files.

For brokers, this cuts both ways. The industry is being told to build capacity through support staff, while lender systems in many cases still assume a single named broker touching every file. If you are scaling a team, lender portal access is a practical constraint worth raising directly with your BDMs.

The Canadian Mirror: Lessons from 35 Per Cent

Lauren van den Berg offered the outside view. Canada’s broker channel sits at roughly 35 per cent market share under varied provincial regulation.

“We are a small but mighty industry in Canada,” van den Berg said. “Our entire marketing campaign intended to demystify the broker channel in Canada… is based around the concept of come to a broker because they are the trusted expert to give you the advice as a Canadian home owner looking to make what is in many cases the most expensive financial purchase of their lives.”

Her emphasis was on professional standards as a differentiator: “An individual who signs up to do a designation program, to get a certification… is someone who is committed to lifelong learning. It is someone who is committed to personal accountability. It is someone who is committed to going above and beyond whatever the minimum required standards set by the regulator are.”

She closed with the line that framed the session: “Standing still is no longer an option. And if you don’t, you look around this room, the person next to you will, and you do yourself, you do your business, you do your teams a disservice if you leave them behind.”

The instructive contrast: a channel at 35 per cent competes hard on advice quality because it has to. A channel at 81 per cent can forget it ever needed to.

Trust, Cyber Risk and the One-Attack Problem

Pannek linked trust to operational security in a way brokers should not skip past.

“Trust in this industry is built when clients feel well understood and feel well supported and they have confidence off the back of that conversation,” she said. “But protecting trust… is critically about the quality of the advice and the support that you give, and it’s about the systems and processes that sit around you… trust is hard won, but it can take one cyber attack to materially undo that.”

Brokers hold concentrated volumes of highly sensitive financial data. The reputational asymmetry is stark: years of relationship-building, undone by a single breach notification. Cyber hygiene is not an IT line item — on this framing it is core to the value proposition.

What This Means for Brokers

Conference warnings are easy to nod at and ignore. Here is what actually follows from this one:

  1. Audit your time against the 20/80 split. Track a fortnight honestly. If nearly all your hours sit in submission-to-settlement, you are investing in the part of the job that is most automatable.
  2. Build a real pre-approval-stage service. Getting clients mortgage-ready months out is defensible, valuable work that no comparison site replicates.
  3. Systematise post-settlement contact. Annual reviews and repricing conversations are where retention is won — and where the loyalty-tax opportunity lives.
  4. Train your team to push back well. Handling a client who has already picked a lender is a specific skill. Script it, practise it, document the reasoning in the file.
  5. Raise support-staff access with your lenders. If portal restrictions are throttling your team’s capacity, that is feedback lenders have now been publicly told they need.
  6. Take a certification seriously. With ASIC’s best interests duty review due to report by Q4, demonstrable professional development is both a differentiator and a defence.
  7. Treat cyber security as client-facing. Review your data handling, access controls and breach response before you need them.

The Bottom Line

The most striking thing about this panel was what it did not blame. With audience polling showing AI as the dominant anxiety, four leaders across association, brokerage, lender and international perspectives all landed on the same answer: the threat is complacency, not technology.

That is a harder message, because it puts the risk inside the industry rather than outside it. Eighty-one per cent share was earned over decades by being more useful than the alternative. It holds only while that remains true — and the parts of the job that make it true are increasingly the ones that sit either side of the transaction, not in it.

What to watch: ASIC’s best interests duty review, due to report by Q4 2026. If it finds the quality of advice does not consistently match the market share, this panel’s warning stops being a conference talking point and becomes a regulatory one.

Sources: The Adviser — “Standing still is the biggest threat to broker market share, panel warns” (24 July 2026); MFAA National Conference 2026, Centrepiece Melbourne Park, 22 July 2026; Australian Broker — MFAA 2026 National Excellence Awards.

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.

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