Seven Melbourne broker business owners gathered for NextGen's 2026 Broker Advisory Roundtable for almost two hours of unscripted conversation about AI, open banking and where the industry is heading. The room was confident rather than anxious. Its central finding was direct: the businesses built to last are the ones staying closest to their clients, not the ones moving fastest. Lenders reclaiming direct market share, AI-assisted client research and open banking's practical uses across retention, portfolio visibility and fraud detection all shaped the discussion.
Lender competition is the sharpest concern the group named. The brokers agreed that direct-to-consumer pressure from banks poses a greater risk than competition among themselves. 'I don't see the competitors as brokers; in fact, I want to use that resource more,' said Elijah Barrett, owner and mortgage broker at Mortgage Choice, Barrett Brokering. Grant Arbuckle, managing director at Loan Studio / GA Finance Solutions, was blunter: 'The lenders are going to become far more prominent and take back market share.' Kate Littlejohn, founder and mortgage broker at K Finance Co, put the risk precisely: 'Very soon it will be that if you're a vanilla payslip mortgage customer, you don't need a broker at all.' The brokers' response was not to compete harder on the same terms but to build something a rate comparison cannot replace.
Clients arrive better prepared and expect faster responses. Chris Foster-Ramsay, director of Foster Ramsay Finance, described the shift: 'For us, the customers have become far more savvy. They do a lot of research online prior to engaging.' Speed has become a minimum standard. 'The most important thing they're seeking is speed. You can no longer take time [to respond], you need to have something pretty quickly ready to go,' Foster-Ramsay said. He added: 'It's really the relationship part, and the trust part is probably more important than it's been before.' Littlejohn, who moved into broking from a banking background and works primarily with self-employed clients, said her client relationships now extend to the accountant, lawyer and financial advisor, what she calls 'the money crew'.
Enthusiasm for AI ran through the room, but it came with process behind it. Elijah Barrett described the aggregator's vetting role: 'It's approved for us from a due diligence, risk, safety and compliance perspective, and that's changed our business. We're lucky we don't need to do those checks ourselves.' He reported the outcome directly: 'Utilising it has been revolutionary in our business.' Data security shapes how far brokers push the tools. Evelyn Clark, Everlend director and mortgage broker, said the firm had 'played it conservative.' Barrett was clear about the stakes: 'I'm not going to jeopardise the next however-many years of my life and career to save myself a little bit of time.' Caution and enthusiasm sit side by side.
Open banking gave Lucas Barrett, owner and mortgage broker at Mortgage Choice, Barrett Brokering, a practical answer to the first-year review. His firm uses Frollo for consent-based data access: 'We use Frollo and they provide the 12 months of consent one month after settlement, and that leads us to that first-year review. So, when you're touching base with them, it's bang, there's your value.' Damien Roylance, founder and managing director of Entourage, identified a gap lender portals have not closed: 'What I always want is to just look at the portals and get a list, let me scroll, sort by highest balance or highest interest rate. Nobody's ever done that.' Consent-based data delivers that view across every lender, without the portal. Brokers exploring this and related topics can find further premium industry reports on Mortgage Professional Australia.
Open banking also emerged as a fraud defence at the roundtable. Technology caught what manual review missed. Littlejohn described a case where falsified documents passed initial checks: 'Payslips were doctored, bank statements were doctored, everything was doctored. It wasn't until it got to the fraud team. It was the technology that ran it through and picked it up.' The case shows consent-based data doing more than retention work. It closes a gap that document-only verification leaves open. For brokers working with complex client profiles, that layer of automated cross-checking is no longer optional.
Brokers expect admin to shrink and advisory work to fill the space. 'Broking will become more of an advisory-type role,' said Arbuckle, though he added a warning: 'You will be found out whether you're actually good at what you do or not, and tech can only save you to a certain point. There's going to be a continued cohort that will just slip away.' Roylance put a number on the structural shift: 'Less admin people. We've got this idea floating around of a "$1 billion broker with no staff." I don't think that's unrealistic in five years' time.' Lucas Barrett grounded the outlook: 'The business you're running right now is 100% guaranteed not to be the same business you're running in five years.'
AI can generate answers. Clients still want a person behind the decision. Clark described the gap: 'When they start using AI, particularly as a search platform to ask questions, there's a lot of questions coming through now that aren't necessarily relevant to that client. At the end of the day, clients want that final sign-off from a human.' Lucas Barrett put the same point in terms of the transaction's weight: 'If it's going to be the biggest financial decision of their life, an internet banking app can't do that.' The brokers' shared conclusion is that trust is not a feature AI can replicate. It is the reason the broker relationship exists at all.