Revealed! Which lender do brokers most highly rate?

Agile Market Intelligence has released some headline findings from the 15th annual Third-Party Lending Report, which pulls together responses from its major annual broker survey.

Undertaken by Agile Market Intelligence between 1 March and 3 May 2024, the Third-Party Lending Survey 2024 asked 1,001 mortgage and finance brokers to rate the performance of the lenders they had worked with over the previous 12 months.

According to the survey, Macquarie Bank was the most highly rated lender overall for the third year running.

Brokers were asked to rate the importance of 17 factors when it came to recommending a lender to a client:

1. Product range
2. Product pricing
3. Product policy
4. Quality of business development managers
5. Access to and ease in dealing with credit assessment staff
6. Call centre support quality
7. Overall end-to-end turnaround speed
8. Client support post-settlement
9. Training and education provision
10. Broker communication
11. Channel conflict approach
12. Commitment to the broker channel
13. Online lodgement usability and functionality
14. Online application status tracking experience
15. Online resource comprehensiveness
16. Upfront valuations functionality
17. 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).

Macquarie Bank ranked top of the list this year, after receiving consistently high scores across all 17 attributes. It also received the highest score of any lender for turnaround speed (92 per cent), with the lender consistently approving loans in less than two business days.

Areas of improvement for Macquarie included product pricing (with brokers stating that ING and Adelaide Bank had better-priced products than Macquarie) and upfront valuations and broker website/portal (where CBA came out trumps).

However, when it came to the leading attribute that brokers consider when choosing a lender for their clients, quality credit assessment staff was the most important factor this year.

When averaging out the scores as a weighted average percentage, access to and ease in dealing with credit assessment staff was 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.

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.

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.

[Related: Major banks have the edge on tech, say brokers]