With the government’s reform roundtable naming these as priorities but skimping on detail, the window for first movers is open. Here’s the playbook—and the risks—for lenders, brokerages and proptechs in the next 24 months.

Lead: The real prize behind brokers’ reform asks

Strip away the politics and the mortgage industry’s wishlist converges on one idea: velocity. Compress planning timelines, smooth tax distortions, and industrialise AI, and you accelerate the housing‑finance flywheel—more viable projects, faster loan decisions, lower cost‑to‑serve, and ultimately better affordability. The roundtable’s post‑event communiqués flagged housing approvals streamlining, AI as a national priority, and long‑term tax reform as headline areas. Details remain scarce, but directionally this is the right stack for an economy wrestling with weak productivity and acute supply shortages.

Why business should care: brokers now intermediate roughly 70% of new Australian home loans (MFAA trend data), making them a system‑level distribution and risk gate. Refinancing spiked above A$20 billion per month at points in 2023, arrears have risen but remain relatively contained around the mid‑1% range on 30‑day metrics (S&P/ARR data), and bank net interest margins have compressed towards ~1.7% at the majors. Policy that trims friction will ripple across volumes, margins and credit quality.

Market context: mortgage broking’s centrality to housing finance

Australia’s Housing Accord targets 1.2 million new homes over five years. Against that ambition, dwelling approvals and completions have lagged targets amid planning bottlenecks, labour constraints and higher financing costs. In this environment, brokers do three things that matter nationally: they expand borrower choice, pressure lender pricing through switching, and increasingly triage risk via data‑rich pre‑assessment tools.

Bargaining power has shifted towards consumers as digital comparison and broker competition intensified; churn is now a structural feature, not a cyclical blip. For lenders, that means thinner margins and a premium on process speed. For developers, time‑to‑permit is now as material as cost‑of‑capital in determining project viability.

Policy pillars from the roundtable: what’s signalled and what’s still vague

Three pillars matter most to housing‑finance velocity:

• Planning and approvals: The government has signalled national coordination to streamline approvals. Expect templates for code‑assessable development, digital lodgement standards and performance benchmarking across states. The payoff is real: international experience suggests that consistent codes and digital workflows can cut median approval times meaningfully.
• Tax settings: Economists remain split on options—rebalancing towards consumption taxes (e.g., broadening GST) to reduce distortive income taxes; recalibrating property investor incentives (negative gearing, 50% CGT discount) to moderate demand‑side pressures; and shifting stamp duties to land tax to improve mobility. AMP’s Shane Oliver has argued the “low‑hanging fruit” from the 1990s has been picked; fresh productivity gains require more contentious trade‑offs. The roundtable nodded, but specifics are deferred.
• AI and productivity: Making AI a national priority aligns with Tech Council estimates that generative AI could add up to A$115 billion to GDP by 2030. In mortgages, AI’s practical edge is document intelligence, fraud detection, personalised advice at meaningful scale and straight‑through processing (STP) of low‑risk cases—provided governance, explainability and consumer duty rules are met.

The catch: timelines and accountability are unclear. For capital allocators, policy intent is helpful; investable certainty requires targets, deadlines and interoperable standards.

Strategy lens: PESTLE + Five Forces on the mortgage market

PESTLE

• Political/Regulatory: Broker Best Interests Duty is entrenched; remuneration and clawback settings remain under watch. APRA’s operational risk (CPS 230) and information security (CPS 234) frameworks tighten controls on outsourcing and AI deployment.
• Economic: Slower growth, high migration, and elevated construction costs create a bind—demand is firm, supply lags. Rate volatility keeps refinancing elevated and stresses serviceability buffers.
• Social: Affordability pressures push multi‑generational living and regional moves; investor sentiment swings with tax expectations.
• Technological: CDR open banking is live but under‑utilised; digital ID reforms are progressing, enabling lower‑friction KYC. GenAI moves from pilots to bounded production with human‑in‑the‑loop.
• Legal: Privacy, unfair contract terms, and AI explainability standards shape model design and data partnerships.
• Environmental: Green building codes and energy performance disclosures influence valuations and green‑loan product demand.

Five Forces

• Rivalry: Intense price‑based competition among lenders; broker channel is the battleground.
• Threat of new entrants: Fintech lenders and non‑banks leverage faster underwriting; barrier is funding cost, not distribution.
• Bargaining power of buyers: High—brokers amplify consumer power; rate‑match behaviours compress margins.
• Bargaining power of suppliers: Data providers and credit bureaus gain leverage as AI models hinge on data quality; brokers command distribution rents.
• Threat of substitutes: Banking‑as‑a‑service and embedded finance nibble at traditional origination; Big Tech remains an over‑the‑horizon risk.

Implementation reality: where policy meets the loan file

The messy middle matters. Planning is state‑led and locally executed, so national intent meets council heterogeneity. For lenders and brokerages, execution priorities are clearer:

• Approve faster, safely: Deploy document AI for bank statements, payslips and trust deeds; use rules‑based triage to route simple, low‑risk files to STP. Aim to lift STP share to 25–40% of vanilla loans over 12–18 months.
• Data plumbing: Invest in CDR consent orchestration and enrichment pipelines. Target a two‑minute bank‑data pull, with automated income/expense categorisation accuracy above 95%.
• Model governance: Stand up model inventories, bias testing, challenger models and human‑in‑the‑loop controls aligned to CPS 230/234 and consumer protection obligations.
• Broker economics: Optimise file quality with pre‑validation tools; reduce rework and clawback risk. Track cost‑to‑serve per settled loan; best‑in‑class brokerages push toward A$900–A$1,200.
• Risk recalibration: Update affordability calculators for living‑cost inflation and energy bills; integrate property‑level climate risk scores to avoid stranded collateral.

Case studies and global signals

Approvals reform: Singapore’s consistent codes and digital planning have delivered predictable timelines that developers can bank; the lesson is standardisation before speed. In Canada, British Columbia’s small‑scale multi‑unit zoning shift is unlocking gentle density through by‑right approvals, a potential template for Australian middle‑ring suburbs.

Open finance and digital identity: The UK’s open banking ecosystem now counts millions of active users, catalysing account‑to‑account payments and bank‑data‑driven underwriting. Singapore’s Singpass, with near‑universal resident adoption, shows how high‑trust digital identity compresses KYC from days to minutes—an instructive benchmark for Australia’s Digital ID rollout.

Tax tweaks and behaviour: New Zealand’s recent oscillation on investor interest deductibility underlines how tax settings quickly shift investor demand and rental supply. For Australia, predictability and gradualism in any change to negative gearing or CGT discounts will be vital to avoid whiplash effects.

Outlook and playbook for first movers

Scenarios (12–24 months)

• Status quo drift: Vague national signals, uneven state execution. Housing supply inches up; competition stays price‑heavy. Winners: lowest‑cost originators and refinance specialists.
• Moderate reform: Digital approvals standards adopted by early states; targeted tax pilots (e.g., duty‑to‑land‑tax trials); AI adoption scales with clearer guardrails. Winners: lenders and brokers that industrialise STP and data‑driven risk, capturing share without blowing out losses.
• Accelerated reform: Coordinated approvals benchmarks, broader tax rebalancing, rapid digital ID uptake. Winners: platforms that orchestrate identity, consented data and credit decisioning end‑to‑end; developers with shovel‑ready, code‑compliant designs.

Execution KPIs

• Application‑to‑conditional‑approval cycle time: cut by 30–50% for vanilla cases.
• STP rate: 25–40% of low‑risk files without manual touch.
• Cost‑to‑serve per loan: -20% year‑on‑year.
• Data‑consent adoption: >60% of applicants share CDR data.
• Early arrears (30–89 days): flat to down despite higher throughput.

Capital allocation

• Lenders: Replatform underwriting pipelines, partner on digital ID/CDR, and ring‑fence a model‑risk budget. Double down on green and build‑to‑rent products to align with planning priorities.
• Brokerages: Build proprietary data capture, invest in compliance automation for Best Interests Duty, and use predictive analytics to retain at‑risk customers 90 days pre‑fixed‑rate expiry.
• Proptechs/Fintechs: Solve plumbing first—identity, consent, categorisation—then specialise in niches (self‑employed income verification, construction drawdown automation).

The contrarian view: even partial progress on approvals and AI could deliver outsized gains because the baseline is so manual and fragmented. Waiting for perfect policy clarity is a luxury competitors will happily exploit. In a market where time is the ultimate spread, speed—governed, data‑rich, and explainable—is the most defensible moat.