The Compliance Maze
"It's not about being smart enough to understand compliance. It's about having someone walk you through it the first few times, so you're not guessing what a checklist actually means."
Compliance is usually the first thing that makes a new broker feel out of their depth. Not because it's conceptually difficult, but because it's granular, it changes, and there's very little room for guesswork. Miss a checkbox and a deal can get delayed, declined, or flagged for review.
What a real compliance checklist actually covers
- Credit Guide and Privacy Consent: including your ACL number, credit representative number, and AFCA membership number, all reissued to clients every 12 months
- Your top lender panel: every broker's panel is different, so a checklist built around "the top six lenders" only works once you know which six are actually yours
- Verification of identity and documents: who verified them, what method was used, and the date of the interview
- Supporting evidence for income: whether it's recurring, from super, from an investment, and how many supporting pieces it needs
- Exit strategy: particularly for clients over 56, where lenders want a credible plan through to age 75 or retirement
- Referral and commission disclosures, and a severity rating flagging anything that needs addressing before or after submission
None of this is unreasonable, it's there to protect the client and the broker. But doing it for the first time with no one checking your work makes it easy to miss something small that turns into a real problem later.
You don't need to memorise every requirement. You need someone experienced enough to check your first files with you, so the checklist becomes a habit instead of a source of anxiety.
