Education standards, tenure and workforce diversity have all shifted since the Royal Commission. Deloitte's 2025 data shows a channel that now looks like a profession rather than a sales network.
The most under-reported finding in Deloitte's Value of Mortgage and Finance Broking 2025 is not about market share. It is about qualifications: 86% of brokers now hold a Diploma of Finance and Mortgage Broking Management or higher, a level of formal education that did not characterise the channel a decade ago.
Three shifts at once
- Education: Diploma-level qualification is now the effective baseline, not a differentiator
- Regulation: Best Interests Duty made documented, client-first advice a legal obligation
- Experience: broker numbers grew 29% since 2018 while average tenure continued to lengthen
Deloitte reports brokers were roughly ten times more likely to say Best Interests Duty had a positive impact on their business than a negative one. Rather than constraining the channel, the reform gave brokers a defensible standard to point to when competing against direct-to-lender offers.
The cost of professionalism is administrative
Higher standards come with a paperwork burden. Brokers must evidence the reasoning behind every recommendation, retain records of client circumstances, and demonstrate that the option presented was in the client's interests. The report is clear that compliance workload is one of the sector's binding constraints on growth.
"Trust in the channel rose after BID. So did the volume of records required to sustain it."
Systems as the release valve
A profession that must document its reasoning needs infrastructure that captures reasoning automatically. Contact history, rate comparisons at the time of advice, and the basis for each review should be recorded as a byproduct of doing the work — not reconstructed at audit time.
Source: Deloitte Access Economics, The Value of Mortgage and Finance Broking 2025, prepared for the MFAA (February 2025).