The FBAA Wants Broker Conduct in One National Register. ASIC Hears the Pitch on 16 November — and Instrument 2024/647 Already Lets Aggregators Ask

The register is an idea on a table. Your conduct record, however, is already written — in pieces, by your aggregator, your lenders and your complaints history. This is what is in it, and how to check it before someone else does.

1. What the FBAA has actually proposed

The Finance Brokers Association of Australia has put a white paper in front of ASIC proposing something the broker channel has never had: a single, independent register of broker conduct. According to reporting by Australian Broker and The Adviser on 10 November, the paper was submitted ahead of an industry roundtable on 16 November, and floats the idea that the register could be operated by an existing independent credit reporting bureau, with Equifax and Experian named as possible operators.

On the reporting available, the proposal is deliberately thin on mechanics and heavier on principle. The register would give lenders and aggregators a consistent way to assess the track record of individual brokers and credit representatives, rather than relying on whatever each institution happens to hold. Access could extend to industry associations and regulators, and — with limits — potentially to consumers.

FBAA chief executive Leo Gagic framed the purpose as protective rather than punitive, and was explicit about the document’s status.

“A centralised register is less about identifying the few who do the wrong thing.” … “We’ve put forward an idea, not a complete solution.”Leo Gagic, chief executive officer, Finance Brokers Association of Australia

He also set out the conditions. “Any model would need safeguards around verified conduct outcomes,” he said, adding that protections for privacy, procedural fairness and the correction of inaccurate information would be necessary. Those four words — verified conduct outcomes — are doing an enormous amount of work, and we return to them below.

2. The 81.6% problem

The context for all of this is the channel’s own success. MFAA research compiled by Cotality, published on 3 September, put broker market share at a record 81.6% of new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter — up from 77.6% a year earlier and 81.0% in the March quarter. Brokers facilitated $139.08 billion in new home lending in that quarter alone, around $17.49 billion more than the same period in 2025.

At four loans in five, the broker channel is no longer an alternative distribution path. It is the mortgage market. And regulatory attention is a predictable function of market share. When a channel writes the overwhelming majority of a country’s home loans, the question of how conduct within that channel is monitored stops being an industry housekeeping matter.

3. The backdrop nobody in the channel enjoys discussing

The register proposal does not arrive in a vacuum. In August, AUSTRAC published findings from Operation Claw, work conducted through the Fintel Alliance using data from 10 major Australian banks. Reporting on those findings described potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in suspected fraudulent loan applications, concentrated around Sydney properties, and recurring warning signs that included the repeated appearance of the same brokers, accountants and law firms across multiple applications. Brokers, lawyers, accountants and other entities were referred to police, tax authorities and the corporate regulator. Accounts of the number referred differ between outlets, so the precise figure is best treated as unsettled.

The Adviser has separately reported that CBA self-reported potential mortgage fraud of around $1 billion, with wider exposure across the five largest banks put at approximately $4 billion. Those figures come from that outlet’s reporting rather than from a bank or regulator disclosure we have read, and should be weighted accordingly.

4. The part most brokers have missed: ASIC already has this on its calendar

Here is the fact that turns a speculative proposal into something with a date attached. On 30 September, ASIC wrote to bank boards and executives setting out its supervisory priorities for the banking sector in 2026–27. One section of that letter is headed “Lending practices and broker oversight,” with an expected commencement of Q3 2026–27.

ASIC’s own words: “We will commence a review into various aspects of lender conduct.” The letter says this is likely to focus on the impact of the short-term variable remuneration changes introduced by banks for proprietary lenders in 2024, the use of referrers by lenders, and lender oversight of brokers. It also ties the work to earlier activity, noting the review “follows ASIC’s work with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and AUSTRAC in relation to reported instances of mortgage loan fraud.”

Read that carefully, because the subject matters. The review is into lender conduct. ASIC is not announcing a review of brokers; it is announcing a review of how banks supervise the brokers they accredit. Practically, though, a regulator asking a lender to demonstrate how it monitors broker-originated lending, how it controls accreditation and re-accreditation, and how it detects application-quality and fraud indicators will produce one predictable response: lenders will go looking at their broker records. Those records are about you.

That is the strategic read. Whether or not a central register is ever built, the demand for defensible broker conduct data is arriving from the lender side on a published timetable.

5. Your conduct footprint already exists — here is where it lives

Brokers often assume their professional record is essentially their aggregator’s compliance file plus a clean AFCA sheet. It is wider than that, and most of it is held by parties who will never show it to you unprompted.

Reference checking. Since 20 August 2024, the ASIC Corporations and Credit (Reference Checking and Information Sharing Protocol) Instrument 2024/647 has replaced the earlier 2021/429 instrument. Following 2023 amendments to the Corporations Act 2001 and the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009, the updated protocol enables mortgage broking intermediaries — aggregators — to be asked for references on mortgage broker licensees and their representatives, which the 2021 protocol did not permit.

The detail brokers should sit with is this: on ASIC’s own account of the instrument, it does not impose an obligation on licensees to request those additional references. The capability is permissive. Which means the quality and completeness of reference checking in the channel today depends entirely on whether the licensee on the other side of a move chooses to ask. That inconsistency is precisely the gap the FBAA’s register is pointed at.

Lender accreditation records. Every lender you are accredited with holds a file: accreditation date, volume, conversion, quality flags, any deaccreditation or suspension, and file-quality scoring. Few brokers have ever asked to see one.

Aggregator compliance records. Audit outcomes, remediation items, file-review scores, complaints logged and closed, and any coaching or formal action.

Complaints and disputes. Internal dispute resolution outcomes and any AFCA matters, including those resolved in your favour.

Association standing. Membership history, professional development completion, and any disciplinary process.

6. The real risk in a register: data quality

Brokers inclined to welcome a register on the view that a clean record is an asset should think about the failure mode. A consolidated register is only as fair as the inputs, and the inputs here are generated by commercial parties with their own incentives.

Consider the obvious scenarios. A lender’s file-quality flag raised during a system migration and never reviewed. A complaint logged against the wrong broker in a multi-broker office. A deaccreditation that was commercial — volume thresholds, not conduct — recorded without that distinction. An audit finding closed out years ago but never marked closed. None of these are misconduct. All of them could read as conduct signal in a consolidated record.

This is why Gagic’s “verified conduct outcomes” qualifier matters more than the register concept itself. There is a material difference between a register of findings — determinations made through a process with evidence and a right of reply — and a register of allegations, flags and commercial decisions. The first could genuinely protect good brokers. The second would create a permanent, portable record of unadjudicated claims, and the broker would carry it between lenders without ever having had the chance to contest it.

If brokers engage with this proposal on one point, it should be that one. The question to press is not “should there be a register” but “what evidentiary threshold does an entry have to clear, and what is the correction mechanism when it is wrong.”

7. What to review this week

None of this requires waiting for 16 November. A broker can audit their own conduct footprint in a couple of hours, and the exercise has standalone value in a year when lenders will be asked to show their broker-monitoring work.

1. Request your aggregator compliance summary. Ask for every audit outcome, file-review score and remediation item on your record, and the status of each. Confirm closed items are recorded as closed.
2. Reconcile your accreditation list. Write down every lender you believe you are accredited with, then check it against your aggregator’s list. Dormant and lapsed accreditations are common and occasionally recorded as something less neutral.
3. Document any commercial deaccreditation. If a lender has removed your accreditation for volume or inactivity, get that reason in writing now, while someone still remembers. It is the single most likely item to be misread in any consolidated record.
4. Check your complaints trail. List every IDR matter and AFCA complaint, including those closed in your favour, and make sure the outcome is recorded alongside the allegation rather than the allegation sitting alone.
5. Review your reference-check exposure. If you have changed licensee or aggregator since August 2024, ask what was provided and what was requested. If you are planning a move, ask what your current aggregator would say.
6. Tighten the file evidence that creates the record. Conduct data is generated by file quality. Best Interest Duty documentation, lender-selection reasoning and verification notes are what a lender’s monitoring systems actually read.
7. Diarise the dates. 16 November for the industry roundtable; Q3 2026–27 for ASIC’s expected commencement of the lending practices and broker oversight review.

8. What to watch next

Three things will tell brokers whether this proposal has legs. Whether the FBAA publishes the white paper in full, which would allow the channel to assess the model rather than the headline. Whether ASIC says anything substantive after 16 November, as opposed to receiving the paper and moving on. And whether the MFAA — which maintains its own multi-layered integrity framework — backs a central register, opposes it, or proposes an alternative. An industry split between the two associations would effectively end the proposal’s near-term prospects.

Watch the lender side too. If banks begin asking accredited brokers for more conduct attestation ahead of ASIC’s review, that is the register arriving by private contract rather than public policy — and without the safeguards the FBAA says any model would need.

A central broker conduct register is an idea on a table, not a change to prepare for. Brokers who spend this week worrying about it are worrying about the wrong thing. The useful response is narrower and more durable. Your conduct record already exists, held in pieces by parties whose incentives are not yours, and in 2026–27 a regulator will be asking lenders to demonstrate what they do with it. Knowing what is in that record, correcting what is wrong, and documenting the commercial decisions that could be mistaken for conduct findings is worth doing on its own terms. If a register is ever built, you will have done the work. If it never is, you will still have a cleaner file and a clearer answer the next time a lender asks.