Behind every broker: NextGen and ApplyOnline on an industry at a turning point

Renee Blethyn, head of broker partnerships at NextGen, on the findings of the 2026 NextGen & ApplyOnline Experience Report – and why the integrity of every application has never mattered more

Q. ApplyOnline sits at the centre of how most Australian brokers lodge loans. Why is broker feedback at this scale so important to how the platform evolves?

Because the platform only gets better if we truly understand how brokers are running their businesses: how they work, what tools they’re using, where the friction is, and where we can do more. More than 650 brokers responded this year across every major aggregator, and that depth of feedback is genuinely invaluable. The second time you run a survey like this, brokers rightly expect to see that what they previously shared landed somewhere. What we wanted this report to demonstrate is that we take their feedback seriously, we track it year on year, and we bring our lender and aggregator partners into those findings, so we can work through the insights together.

Q. You mentioned lenders and aggregators. What role do they play in what comes next?

A significant one. The survey captures broker sentiment about their end-to-end experience on ApplyOnline, and that experience is shaped by lenders and aggregators as much as it is by us. Turnaround times, document requirements, CRM integration, the quality of information flowing through the platform – these are shared responsibilities. So, we’ll be having detailed conversations with our lender and aggregator partners about the specific feedback that was shared with us and working collaboratively to improve the lodgement experience. The report is a starting point for those conversations – not the end of them.

Q. Open banking features strongly in this year’s data. Why is that significant?

Because it signals a genuine shift in how brokers are verifying income and expenses, and it matters enormously in the current environment. Open banking awareness among brokers crossed the 50 per cent threshold this year, up nearly 12 per cent on 2024. Usage of Frollo across both the stand-alone Frollo for Brokers tool and through CRM integration has grown to 28 per cent, and usage of screen scraping is declining. We’re now processing around 80,000 open banking-enabled home loan applications through ApplyOnline every year – a figure that has doubled in 12 months. That’s not a trend on the horizon – it’s already happening at scale. When brokers have access to verified, consent-based financial data at the point of application, the whole process works better: it’s faster, cleaner, and significantly more defensible. In a climate where document integrity is under scrutiny right across the industry, that matters more than ever.

Q. Fraudulent and doctored documents have become one of the industry’s most pressing concerns. What role does NextGen and ApplyOnline play in that conversation?

The fraud conversation has underscored something we’ve always believed: that the infrastructure underneath the application process is as important as the process itself. Three in four brokers now use at least one AI tool in their business, reflecting a profession embracing technology to work smarter. Building robust verification into the platform matters because it protects everyone. NextGenID – our digital verification of identity tool – delivers biometric verification, real-time document authentication. It is built directly into ApplyOnline. Combined with open banking-sourced financial data, the risk profile is fundamentally different because unlike manually submitted documents, open banking data flows directly from the source. It cannot be manipulated. The answer to the challenges the industry is facing isn’t to slow down the process – it’s to make the verification layer strong enough that the integrity of every application speaks for itself.

Q. What’s the one thing you’d want brokers to take away from the report?

That we’re listening, genuinely and consistently. What this year’s data reflects back is a broker community that is more tech-savvy, more operationally sophisticated, and more engaged than ever before. With brokers facilitating approximately three-quarters of all residential home loans in Australia, that evolution matters. NextGen’s job is to keep pace with that evolution, and the survey helps us assess our progress.

Download the 2026 NextGen & ApplyOnline Experience Report here.

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