Login
ISCOVER
Open banking tools are being underutilised by brokers, but those who are adopting them are finding significant time savings, according to a new report.
Technology provider NextGen has released a new report outlining that brokers could be missing out on “transformative” potential of open banking, saying that take-up of open banking features built into its lodgement platform ApplyOnline® has been low.
Its 2025 Industry Insights Report, commissioned by NextGen and conducted by Agile Market Intelligence, found that while open banking is gaining traction across Australia’s financial services industry, adoption among mortgage brokers is still limited.
Currently, brokers are able to access financial data from consumers when given permission to do so through the ‘trusted adviser’ model.
By harnessing open banking to pull this verified data, brokers can accelerate the loan approval processes by reducing the time for documents to be collected and verified. NextGen offers brokers access to open banking features through its lodgement system ApplyOnline and has partnered with aggregators – including Connective and Finsure – to offer its Financial Passport solution to brokers, too.
However, in a survey of 703 mortgage brokers for the Industry Insights Report, NextGen found that only 18 per cent of brokers had adopted the open banking features available through ApplyOnline.
According to NextGen, a key factor behind this low adoption was the continued reliance on legacy systems such as screen scraping and manual document uploads, with the majority of brokers (76 per cent) primarily relying on screen-scraping technologies, rather than open banking tools to gather information from their clients.
Indeed, 64 per cent of brokers said the main tool they used to gather financial information from clients was BankStatements (a screen-scraping tool created by illion).
Only 6 per cent said that open banking with NextGen was the main tool they used for gathering financial data.
Another factor impeding uptake was awareness, the report revealed, with 61 per cent of brokers saying they were unaware that open banking was already available within ApplyOnline.
The report said: “For those who have embraced Open Banking, the benefits are clear. Brokers report faster access to data, better security, and more efficient workflows.
“With tools like Financial Passport, brokers can receive a client’s verified financial data in as little as eight minutes. This enables more confident, data-driven conversations and quicker pre-approvals...
“By giving brokers secure, detailed access to client financial data from the start, it empowers them to act in their clients’ best interests. This capability supports compliance with the Best Interests Duty and equips brokers to confidently guide clients through complex lending decisions in a volatile rate environment.”
Speaking on The Adviser’s In Focus podcast, Renee Blethyn, head of broker partnerships at NextGen, said that open banking data not only saves brokers time but is also “the safest way” of collecting financial information and “the most accurate”.
“But more importantly, it’s actually giving the broker the richest set of data,” she said.
Blethyn said that open banking adoption was increasing – revealing that NextGen had seen a 252 per cent increase in broker usage from November 2024 to April 2025 – and a 182 per cent uplift in customers completing the request to share their data with their broker so that the broker can use the information in their loan application.
“Particularly when it comes to things like pre approvals, we’re trying to take out those low-value interactions that are a bit annoying for a customer and make it easier for a broker to obtain that information so that when they’re reaching out to the customer, they’re having those real value-add conversations and they’re able to deliver more positive messaging rather than constantly having to ask for information that generally just drives everyone nuts,” Blethyn said.
Chris Foster Ramsey, broker director at Foster Ramsey Finance in Melbourne, said he believed that open banking “streamlines the process, providing real time access to accurate financial information”.
“It not only saves time, but also gives us the assurance of its first party compliant data and helps reduce the risk of data entry and half truths. The seamless integration allows us to focus more on client needs and less on administrative tasks,” he said.
To improve take-up, NextGen has said it is investing in education and technology access and has launched a new training website and rolled out webinars and mentoring content in response to feedback calling for greater guidance and support.
You can find out more about the survey and its findings in The Adviser’s In Focus podcast.
Tune in to the episode, ‘How broker feedback is shaping ApplyOnline’, sponsored by NextGen, here:
[Related: Brokers increasingly delegating and outsourcing loan processing]
JOIN THE DISCUSSION