Aggregators should be pushing back on banks

Mortgage advisers have a lot more power than they realise when it comes to banks pushing out mortgage application times.

Tuesday, March 25th 2025, 8:21AM 1 Comment

by Sally Lindsay

Mortgage advisers have a lot more power than they realise when it comes to banks pushing out mortgage application times.

Commercial finance brokerage Capital Connect senior manager and market commentator Ziggy Munz says they should be putting pressure on their aggregators to be reminding banks there are five or six of them and the flow of origination can disappear if they don’t compete to better serve the third party distribution channel.

He says nearly 100% of advisers would operate through an aggregator and even those who operate as their own FAPs will still go through an aggregator to access banks.

“There is power in numbers and advisers should be pressuring their aggregators to make a stand on banks’ turnaround times.”

He says unfortunately aggregators in New Zealand seem to be preoccupied primarily with growing their user base and competing with one another rather than using their leverage to elicit better outcomes for advisers and their customers from the banks.

“It is generally accepted aggregators make internally directed statements to their adviser group, but they generally don’t speak about it publicly. Their advocacy work at best is weak.”

“There is power in numbers and advisers should be pressuring their aggregators to make a stand on banks’ turnaround times.”

Munz says there is a lot of movement amongst advisers in the aggregator space recently. “People are moving to new aggregators and away from larger businesses to get a better deal.”

He says what banks are doing here would not be tolerated in Australia. Advisers and aggregators tend to be more vocal there.

“It is quite different. The Australian aggregator market is incredibly competitive, has a lot of power, and lobbies quite hard against the banks for advisers to get ideal results in the third party distribution channel.”

If New Zealand mortgage advisers are unhappy with the turnaround times and banks advertising to get clients to go direct to their branches, then the people who can fix that, and the only people who can really make a difference, Munz says, are the aggregator groups who control advisers’ deals with the banks.

“That is the level negotiation occurs at – not at an individual level between each adviser and a banker.”

If this was happening across the ditch, aggregators would come down extremely hard. “All hell would break loose,” he says.”

Aggregators are vocal in Australia. They do a lot of advocating for mortgage advisers and pushing back against the bank “If the aggregators do not get on the job, the advisers speak up. That is what needs to happen here.”

Munz is, at the end of this month, moving to manage a new commercial lender in the New Zealand market.

Before working in the finance industry, where he has established networks with some of Australasia’s largest private lenders and high net worth families, Munz spent time in the oil and gas industry and was heavily involved in advising around property investment.

Tags: Ziggy Munz