It seems customers are increasingly happy with mortgage and finance brokers.
The latest figures from the Credit and Investment Ombudsman (CIO) show consumer complaints against mortgage and finance brokers have fallen over the 2015 financial year.
While complaints against mortgage brokers fell, total complaints against financial service providers as a whole rose by 7.4 per cent.
In the 2014 financial year, there were 311 complaints about brokers to the CIO and that made up 6.9 per cent of consumer complaints. In 2015, that figure has fallen to 294 complaints which account for 6.1 per cent of total consumer complaints.
Ombudsman Raj Venga told Australian Broker that complaints about brokers were more common than those about aggregators, and they were usually related to service quality.
“Complaints are generally about the service provided by the broker,” he said.
“Specifically, consumers rely on the broker’s expertise to arrange a suitable loan for them and make a complaint when they consider that the loan is not in fact suitable for them, the broker did not inform them about certain key features or terms of the loan they arranged, or the broker failed to inform them about other options or features which were available.”
Residential mortgages were the cause of most complaints, and as for the financial service provider that was most complained about, that dubious honour went to debt purchasers and collectors who received an unwanted 1,978 consumer complaints, which accounted for 40.7 per cent of all complaints received by the CIO.
Mortgage brokers and aggregators came in five places behind them, representing a much more respectable 6.1 per cent of all complaints, despite actually making up the majority of CIO’s membership base.
Mortgage brokers make up 84 per cent of said base, and can be pleased with not only a year of falling complaints, but also such a small percentage of all financial service provider complaints.
