ISCOVER
Senior leaders of the mortgage broking industry have suggested that banning screen scraping would help accelerate the adoption of open banking.
Speaking on an industry panel in Sydney on Thursday evening (21 August) at NextGen’s mid-year event, members of the industry welcomed the progress made in open banking, but suggested that a key roadblock remained: the continued use of less efficient – and in some cases, less secure, legacy systems.
After hearing some of the core insights from the new State of Open Banking Report 2025, published by open banking provider Frollo, the panellists welcomed that broker usage of the platform had more than doubled (to around 13 per cent of the broker population) and that more than 32,000 Australians were now sharing their financial data with their broker.
However, the chief executive of aggregation group Connective, Glenn Lees, said more could be done.
“There’s a joke about fusion power that says: ‘It’s 10 years away and has been for the last 50 years’. And open banking felt a little bit like that as well. But now that it’s here, the uptake is coming,” Lees said.
“It allows us to answer the one question consumers are asking brokers (which is ‘can I have the money?’) faster, more reliably, and in a way that’s more compliant with NCCP.
“We have a dedicated chain of custody of that information coming through so that we get to answer the question more quickly, more reliably, more compliantly. And that’s just the tip of that iceberg,” he said.
“A broker that is well equipped with the right tools can have an answer in their customer’s hand before anyone else has hit submit on the application. That transforms the process to be more efficient, accurate, and natural for both brokers and customers.”
Lees continued: “But adoption of open banking is really a change management process that we’re heavily engaged in. And I think it becomes a tipping point where everyone will see what that benefit is: more highly digitised processes, more rapid processes and customers getting what they want quicker, which will only strengthen the broker channel more broadly.”
From a lender’s standpoint, ING’s national sales manager Sergio Delvescovo said open banking could reduce time and effort in areas such as income verification, expense analysis, and credit assessment.
“It ultimately drives a faster decision, but also enhances the accuracy of our risk profiling, which allows us to tailor products and pricing,” he said.
“The challenge for us, as lenders, is how we integrate with open banking so that data can actually drive instant decisions or automated decisions.”
However, he cautioned that awareness and trust with open banking remained a key barrier. “Customers just aren’t aware of the benefits of open banking. And the other thing is trust, particularly in this environment where there are a lot of scams. They won’t use technology if they don’t recognise it. And I think brokers and our frontline staff play a pivotal role in educating customers on that,” he said.
Screen scraping should be banned to force adoption
Broker Essentials founder Jason Back said widespread adoption in the broker channel would require overcoming behavioural hurdles and demonstrating clear benefits.
As an example, he flagged that open banking was much more secure than alternative ways of receiving financial data from clients, such as email or screen scraping.
“Brokers need to trust the data integrity – their reputation is at risk if something disrupts the process,” Back said.
“If we look at things like data scraping and digital bank statements ... those provided a really big leap from where we were previously. So the next use case has to be able to show a significant change, to be able to warrant new behaviour. And I don’t know if we’ve been able to sell that yet.
“The broker needs to be able to trust the data integrity ... they don’t want anything that would disrupt the end-to-end process, so they need to have faith in the system. And I think there’s probably some half-truths out there about open banking. So we need to clean up that a little bit about what’s real and what’s not real.”
He continued: “The next use case has to show a significant improvement over current tools to justify changing behaviour. We need more proof of concept, hands-on testing, and practical demonstrations, not just webinars.”
Back added that while some brokers were embracing change, others remained reluctant to let go of legacy systems. “We need to be clear: the consumer is evolving, and if we don’t, we’ll get left behind.”
Transforming broker-client relationships
The chief executive of the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia (MFAA), Anja Pannek, agreed that open banking would fundamentally shift the broker’s role, freeing up time for client relationships rather than paperwork.
“Many aspects of a broker’s role have been weighed down in documentation and compliance and often quite clunky processes,” Pannek said.
“As open banking accelerates, brokers using it as part of their everyday process will be able to spend time with clients at the points it matters. This is going to be a game changer for brokers.”
She pointed to the ability for brokers to access client data for up to 12 months under the Consumer Data Right model as a particularly powerful feature. “It enables the deepening of the client relationship, as opposed to checking if something is on a bank statement,” she said.
Pannek – who also contributed to the State of Open Banking Report – added that the MFAA has lodged more than 15 submissions on open banking and open finance to government and regulators, as part of its advocacy, education, and partnership efforts to drive adoption.
The CEO suggested that she believed screen scraping would be banned in the next year and would encourage greater adoption of open banking.
“I don’t think it’ll be a question of if screen scraping is banned; it will be when it is banned. And I think that’ll be really important for open banking adoption.
“The skill and capability for brokers to succeed in the future will change over time, but the reality is it, it has changed over time. This is an industry that actually has already adopted technology, innovation and regulation,” Pannek said.
Future outlook
Looking ahead, the panellists agreed that open banking and other growing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), would reshape the broker’s role but not replace it.
“The broker remains the trusted person to solve complexity,” Lees said. “These tools are about augmentation, not substitution.”
Pannek echoed this, noting that while technology would remove administrative burdens, the value of brokers lay in their empathy and guidance at key life moments.
Delvescovo predicted the broker channel would continue to grow, supported by efficiency gains: “Three out of four customers already use a broker, and we see that number increasing as the industry becomes more efficient,” he said.
[Related: Broker use of open banking doubles, but CDR issues persist]
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