Time pressure, complex cases, and inconsistent lender criteria – the real obstacles to raising broker standards
Broker standards remain a live concern for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which published its first annual Regulatory Priorities report for the mortgages sector on 12 March.
The report identified three headline priorities – improving consumer outcomes under the Mortgage Rule Review, encouraging responsible lending and supporting mortgage borrowers in financial difficulty, and ensuring the quality of advice. For those working at the coal face, the picture is more nuanced, less a question of bad practice, and more one of competing pressures in a demanding market.
Rhys Edwards, mortgage consultant at Brooks Financial, told Mortgage Introducer about the challenges around broker standards.
"It's time pressures," he said. "Facilitating meeting clients' needs and expectations, as well as ensuring your file is watertight. You've got to write your number of cases, meet your targets, and ensure they're all watertight. The biggest challenge is having enough hours in the day to do everything. I'm sure nobody does a bad file on purpose, but we're only human."
The FCA's supervisory work on second charge mortgages found that standards of advice could be improved, particularly for debt consolidation, with some advisers focusing on whether consumers were eligible for a loan rather than whether it was suitable, and record-keeping was sometimes incomplete, making it hard to demonstrate that advice was tailored and appropriate.
For Edwards, the standard is straightforward: "A good outcome would be, first of all, the client is happy. The advice was correct. You've got service, advice, and the file. A good outcome would be all those things are spot on."
Filling the knowledge gaps
Edwards is pragmatic about the limits of what any one adviser can know. "You don't know absolutely everything, but if the research is done and you spend the time on the client, do the right research, do the right checks, you can find out things you didn't know."
Where he draws a clear line is around specialist knowledge. "The gaps tend to come with more specialist areas, and that's where brokers themselves can choose to either specialise or not deal with those particular areas, so they're not providing any shortfalls in service to clients."
Edwards’s own approach at Brooks Financial is deliberate. He concentrates purely on mortgages and refers protection and life cover to a specialist team.
The FCA has urged firms to invest in quality assurance frameworks genuinely capable of identifying poor advice, not merely frameworks that document the advice process without scrutinising its substance.
What lenders could do differently
When asked what single change would most benefit the industry, Edwards turned his focus towards lenders. "One of the biggest things is the banks listening to the broker more in regards to product ranges, even criteria a little bit. There are certain things that lenders have been doing for years that would make things easier if they just listened to brokers a little more around what we're seeing on the front line.
"Certain banks have certain policies, and it's sometimes very frustrating when one bank would do something that makes complete sense and then another one won't, when it would benefit them and the customer.”
Since the FCA published a statement in March 2025 outlining flexibility in its interest rate stress test rule, 85% of the market has updated its approach and is able to offer around £30,000 more – a demonstration of what can change when the regulator, lenders, and the intermediary market move together.
Standards in progress
Edwards isn't dismissive of where the industry has got to. "It's certainly better than it has been." But brokers continue to face various challenges, with regulatory training, client targets, file quality, and the daily puzzle of matching complex cases to willing lenders all competing for the same finite hours.
That last point is perhaps where the standards debate gets most interesting. Keeping advice quality high is not just a compliance question, it is a product of how well the whole system functions around the broker.
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