The AFIA Code Commenced Across the Non-Banks on Your Panel. Its Paragraph 1.10 Says Mortgage Brokers ‘Generally Act for You’

What actually commenced

Paragraph 1 of the Code is unambiguous about the timing: the Code “was published on 16 September 2025 and is effective from 1 October 2026”. Signatories have had just over a year of transition, which is why most of the industry conversation about this document happened last year and most brokers have never opened it.

Scope is set by paragraph 7, and it is broader than the phrase “consumer code” suggests. The products covered “include but are not limited to: secured and unsecured consumer finance, including credit cards, personal loans, lines of credit or overdrafts, mortgages for residential and investment purposes (including home loans and chattel mortgages) and vehicle finance; secured and unsecured business finance, including lines of credit, debtor and cashflow finance, asset and equipment finance, fleet and vehicle finance; and novated leases”.

Residential and investment mortgages are named explicitly. So is asset and equipment finance, and so is business cashflow lending. If you write residential, commercial or asset finance through non-banks, this is your side of the market.

Compliance is monitored by the Finance Industry Code Compliance Committee, an independent committee chaired by Tim Grimwade, with a consumer representative nominated by the Consumers’ Federation of Australia among its members. On commencement day AFIA chief executive Diane Tate framed it as a shift from undertaking to practice.

The register is the part to use

AFIA publishes a public register of Code Members. Read on commencement day it runs alphabetically from Affirm to Zip Co Limited and names roughly 70 organisations, filterable by code schedule — consumer finance, novated leasing, small business finance, low cost credit contracts and insurance premium funding.

The names a residential broker will recognise include Bluestone Home Loans, Brighten, Liberty Financial, Pepper Money, RedZed Lending Solutions, Resimac Group and Thinktank. On the commercial and SME side the register lists Metrics, Prospa, OnDeck, Moula Money, Lumi and Shift. In asset and equipment finance it lists Angle Asset Finance, Angle Auto Finance, Allied Credit, Branded Financial Services, Finance One, MetroFinance, Morris Finance, Now Finance Group and Westlawn Finance. Latitude Financial Services, Humm Group, MONEYME, Solvar and Society One also appear.

Pepper Money was the first organisation accredited under the Code, in February 2026. Brighte, Navalo Financial Services — trading as Payright BNPL — and Zip acceded on 1 May 2026.

Expect the register to grow, and expect to hear about it from lender business development managers. The committee’s independent chair has been direct about the expectation.

Membership is not the same as coverage

This is the nuance most summaries of the Code have skipped, and it matters most to commercial brokers.

Paragraph 9: “This Code may offer some guidance more broadly, but it does not apply to products we provide to commercial property, government or semi-government customers, or Large Corporate Customers.”

So a lender can be a Code Member and still write transactions the Code does not reach. A Code Member’s commercial property facility may sit outside the Code even while its consumer and small business lending sits inside it. Membership is a lender-level fact. Coverage is a product-level question, and the two are not interchangeable.

Paragraph 11 handles the other direction — the overlap with existing codes. The Code “does not apply to AFIA Members who are signatories to an equivalent industry code”, and specifically, signatories to “the Banking Code of Practice or the Customer Owned Banking Code of Practice are not subject to this Code”. Buy now pay later, online small business lending and insurance premium funding each have their own AFIA code and sit outside this one as well.

Paragraph 1.10

Here is the genuinely novel part. A lender-side document, addressed to customers, now describes what you do.

Schedule 1 of the Code deals with consumer finance. Paragraph 1.10 draws a line between two kinds of intermediary in a single breath: lenders “may authorise Intermediaries (such as motor dealers) to assist you to apply for a credit contract with us so that the credit can be used to purchase goods or services from them. These Intermediaries generally act for us.” Then, immediately: “Other Intermediaries (such as mortgage brokers) may assist … to apply for a credit contract from a number of different credit providers. Those Intermediaries generally act for you.”

Two kinds of intermediary, one paragraph, and the distinction drawn by whose interests they serve. Dealers act for the lender. Brokers act for the customer.

None of that changes your obligations. The best interests duty has said as much since 2021. What is new is that the non-bank tier has collectively put it in writing in a document intended for customers — and that is useful in two concrete ways.

First, it is a clean answer to the question brokers still field across the desk: aren’t you really working for the bank? You can now point at the lender’s own code.

Second, paragraph 1.9 is equally explicit that commission is part of the arrangement: “We may pay a commission to the Intermediary if you enter into (and settle) a credit contract with us.” Paragraph 40 commits lenders, for consumers, to “disclose the amount of remuneration or other benefit if it is ascertainable at the time we make the disclosure”. Paragraph 41 commits them, for small business customers, to contract documentation that “will refer to commissions or other benefits”.

That alters nothing about your own disclosure obligations. It does mean a client may encounter a lender-issued commission reference they have not seen before and ask you about it. If your disclosure and your file notes already explain your remuneration clearly, that conversation is a non-event. If they do not, it is a complaint waiting for a trigger.

What lenders committed to that reaches your files

Hardship — a process commitment, not an outcome

Paragraph 64: “If we become aware or if you tell us that you are experiencing financial difficulties or other hardship, we will work with you to identify ways we may be able to provide support”. Paragraph 69 requires that an agreed contract variation “will be in writing (including in electronic form where permitted by law)”.

Then read the two paragraphs that follow. Paragraph 70: “We are not required to offer a temporary or simple arrangement or a contract variation, but we will provide assistance if we think it will help.” Paragraph 72, for small business: lenders “may consider reasonable modifications” but “are not required to do so”.

If you refer past clients into lender hardship teams — and in the current rate environment plenty of brokers are — set the expectation accordingly. A Code Member has committed to engage, to consider, and to document an agreed variation in writing. It has not committed to approve anything. Paragraph 71 even sets out circumstances where assistance may reasonably be declined, including where the lender reasonably believes the customer’s position cannot be restored or an arrangement is likely to make things worse.

Complaints

Paragraphs 85 to 87 require an internal dispute resolution process and that the lender “explain how we deal with complaints in your contract or other documentation”, handled promptly and consistently with ASIC Regulatory Guides 271 and 277. Paragraphs 89 to 93 cover external escalation to AFCA or to state small business commissioners, and paragraph 90 commits the lender to tell the customer whether it is an AFCA member and what their rights are.

Scams — the paragraph to memorise

Paragraph 60 states that a Code Member will not ask a customer “for information like passwords, PINs or secure access codes in an unsolicited email, text, phone call or message”, ask for remote access to their computer, or ask them to make payments “through unusual mechanisms”. Paragraph 62 points customers to Scamwatch, the police and IDCARE where identity theft is involved.

That is worth knowing close to verbatim, because it gives you a bright line to hand a client who rings mid-settlement about a suspicious contact purporting to come from their lender.

Artificial intelligence, security and vulnerability

Paragraphs 49 and 50 commit a Code Member using customer-facing AI to have “risk management processes to identify and mitigate risks in its use” and to monitor its operation for legal compliance. Paragraphs 55 to 59 cover data protection and information security controls proportionate to the risk. Paragraphs 73 to 77 address vulnerable customers and require lenders to address economic and financial abuse where detected — a thread that connects directly to the co-borrower and financial abuse questions already sitting in broker interview processes. Paragraphs 47 and 48 commit members to accessibility standards including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and paragraph 78 deals with deceased estates.

The limits, stated plainly

Three things this Code is not.

It is not a complaints channel. Paragraph 97 lets a customer report a Code Member to the committee if they believe it has acted inconsistently with the Code. Paragraph 98 is blunt: the committee “does not deal with individual complaints or disputes”. Individual disputes still run through the lender’s internal process and then AFCA. Send a client to the committee expecting a remedy and you will have wasted their time.

It does not spell out its own sanctions. Paragraph 99: if the committee investigates and finds a breach “it can require us to take corrective measures. The CCC can also impose a range of sanctions depending on the nature of the breach.” What those sanctions are is left to the committee’s terms of reference and AFIA’s by-laws. How much the Code is worth in practice will become visible in the committee’s first compliance reporting, not in the drafting.

It is voluntary. Lenders can join and can presumably leave. The register is a point-in-time document, which is the argument for checking it rather than committing it to memory.

Where this touches best interests duty

General information follows, not compliance advice. Your licensee’s position governs how you document anything.

The best interests duty does not require you to consider whether a lender has signed an industry code, and nothing in the Code says it does. But ASIC’s guidance already contemplates the territory. RG 273.71 directs brokers to weigh “matters that are more difficult to quantify, such as the service levels and policies of the credit provider” alongside substantive product features. RG 273.73 includes “the credit policy and risk appetite of the credit provider” among the relevant considerations. RG 273.77 accepts that a consumer may prioritise approval time and compromise on cost in a time-sensitive transaction.

Those are qualitative lender attributes brokers have always been permitted to weigh and have always found slightly awkward to evidence. The Code gives one slice of them a public reference point: whether a lender has committed to a published hardship, complaints, scams and disclosure standard with independent monitoring. For a client whose circumstances make post-settlement conduct genuinely material — a self-employed borrower with lumpy income, a client with a known vulnerability, a small business borrower — that is a reason you can state and evidence alongside rate and policy fit.

The conflict priority rule is untouched. RG 273.144 requires brokers to prioritise the consumer’s interests where they conflict with the broker’s, the licensee’s or an associate’s, and RG 273.147 is clear that a product must not be recommended unless doing so would also be in the consumer’s best interests. Code membership is not a reason to recommend a lender. It is one input among lender attributes you already weigh, carrying exactly the weight the client’s circumstances give it — and no more.

Confirm the approach with your aggregator or licensee’s compliance team before changing how you word anything on file.

What to review this week

The Code itself is a lender obligation, and plenty of brokers will reasonably conclude it changes nothing about how they work. That is a fair reading of the obligations and a poor reading of the opportunity. The register is a broker tool: a published, checkable statement about the post-settlement conduct standards a lender has put its name to, covering exactly the tier of the market where that information has been hardest to get. The difference between brokers who get value from this week and brokers who do not is roughly ten minutes with a webpage.