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The quality of credit assessment staff is now the leading factor for brokers when making lender recommendations, the Third-Party Lending Report has revealed.
With rates and turnaround times having steadied over the past year, the service of lender personnel has become the biggest differentiating factor for brokers, a major new broker survey has found.
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Credit assessment staff are now the leading influencing factor for brokers when recommending a lender to their client, according to the Third-Party Lending Report 2024.
The 15th annual report pulls together the findings of the Third-Party Lending survey, undertaken by Agile Market Intelligence between 1 March and 3 May 2024, which asked 1,001 mortgage and finance brokers to rate the performance of the lenders that they have worked with over the previous 12 months.
Brokers were asked to rate the importance of 17 factors when it came to recommending a lender to a client:
- Product range
- Product pricing
- Product policy
- Quality of business development managers
- Access to and ease in dealing with credit assessment staff
- Call centre support quality
- Overall end-to-end turnaround speed
- Client support post-settlement
- Training and education provision
- Broker communication
- Channel conflict approach
- Commitment to the broker channel
- Online lodgement usability and functionality
- Online application status tracking experience
- Online resource comprehensiveness
- Upfront valuations functionality
- Web presence and effectiveness of broker web portal
Respondents were asked to rate each attribution by importance from 1 (not important at all) to 5 (extremely important).
When averaging out the scores as a weighted average percentage, access to and ease in dealing with credit assessment staff were the leading attribute, at 90 per cent.
This overtook product pricing as the leading influencing factor for broker recommendations (which ranked first in 2023), which came in a close second at 89 per cent.
Macquarie Bank was the most highly rated lender overall for the third year running, having received consistently high scores across all 17 attributes, including credit assessment staff, BDMs, and call centre support.
Brokers rated Macquarie Bank and Bankwest as the banks with the best credit assessment staff over the year, while Bluestone Mortgages and RedZed came out on top for the non-banks.
Macquarie received the highest score of any lender for turnaround speed (92 per cent).
However, ING and Adelaide Bank were rated above Macquarie for product pricing, while CBA pipped Macquarie to the post for upfront valuations and broker website/portal.
Noting the movement in the leading influencing factors, Michael Johnson, head of Agile Market Intelligence, commented: “Consistency has become the key measurement for brokers in the most recent survey, while pricing is still an important factor, credit assessment staff has overtaken it as the most important factor this year for broker recommendations.
“The 2023 survey was conducted between 1 March and 3 May 2024, when the cash rate was 3.60 per cent; the highest level it had been since June 2012.
“We have seen from broker comments in the report, they want to be able to go to a lender two different times in a week and get the same outcome for the same deal.
“Turnaround times for a majority of lenders are sharpening and consistency is now the biggest factor in their decision.”
The full, interactive Third-Party Lending Report can be acquired from Agile Market Intelligence and a deep dive into the different lender segments will be uncovered in upcoming editions of The Adviser magazine. Keep an eye out for the July edition of The Adviser magazine to find out how brokers rated the big four banks.
[Related: Non-banks most committed to broker channel, say brokers]
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