Mortgage brokers demonstrated strong performance with less than 1% AFCA complaints

AFCA Datacube from the period of July to December 2020 show complaints have halved to a total of 34,212 received, compared to 76,872 in the previous period from July 2019 to June 2020. 

(For those of you who may not know, AFCA is a not-for-profit company that assists consumers and small businesses to reach agreements with financial firms about how to resolve their complaints)

Half of these complaints were resolved at registration & referral. The majority of the complaints were from the state of New South Wales followed by Victoria and the third state with most complaints was Queensland. 

Mortgage broking industry has proven a strong record with less than 1% of the complaints received related to mortgage brokers. That equals to only 121 complaints against mortgage brokers relating to banking and finance products. 

For the second half of 2020, the monthly average for complaints associated with financial difficulty fell about 35%. AFCA received a total of 1,636 complaints about home loans in particular that progressed to the case management stage, out of which 1,326 complaints related to banks during the reported period, while seven complaints (0.43 per cent) related to mortgage brokers.

AFCA CEO Justin Untersteiner commented further on this: “It’s vital that consumers and financial service providers work together to resolve issues quickly.”

This is not to blow our own trumpets but it’s important to highlight your skills and the level of trust that customers have with brokers. Coming back to our chat with Paul Smith from ActivePipe, one of the skills that brokers need to have in the digital age is self-promotion with a focus on personal branding. Being able to explain their skill set properly to simply draw attention to their work and achievement is an advantage. You should totally take pride in your professional accomplishment and feed that back into workplace success. 

Post pandemic, brokers must strive to have less complaints and keep demonstrating your values and controlling your narrative in the industry. You’re going to have to weigh up what you do and don’t – moving forward. Try to figure out what you’re doing well and why as well as what you could be doing better and how. Set yourself goals and give yourself feedback as you go to help you effectively move on from situations and perform to your best each time.