Just released: Third-Party Lending Report: Commercial Lending

Agile Market Intelligence tracks broker experience and sentiment with commercial lenders they’ve worked with in the past year. The report reveals detailed broker assessments across five categories: Personnel, Products, Support, and Technology, identifying lender strengths, shortfalls, and trends in the residential lending industry. The Third-Party Lending Report enables a better understanding of the perceived level of broker support by various parts of their proposition and tracks changes year-on-year. 

Now in its second year, the 2026 Third-Party Lending Report: Commercial Lending surveyed 723 commercial brokers to evaluate the performance of lenders they have worked with in the past 12 months. Each lender was then rated across 14 attributes spanning the aforementioned four categories. And when it comes to recommending lenders to clients, brokers also identified the most important factors that drive their decisions across three different loan types: commercial mortgages, business loans and asset finance.

Key findings

• The top factor in choosing a lender to recommend is product policy, with 93% of brokers identifying it as an important deciding factor.
  
  
• NAB and ANZ have the highest broker usage at 34% each in the past 12 months.
  
  
• More brokers wrote asset finance (from 54% to 61%) and business loans (from 60% to 65%) this past year.

Market Leaders

The Market Leader seal recognises the highest-rated lender within each lending segment. Each of these Market Leaders showcased an average outstanding performance within the five categories: products, support, speed, technology, and personnel. 

For the Market Leaders, the winners per segment are as follows:

• Major banks: Westpac
  
  
• Non-major bank (Large): ING
  
  
• Asset and equipment finance: Metro Finance
  
  
• Specialist lenders: RedZed
  
  
• Business lenders: Lumi
  
  
• Consumer and personal finance lenders: MoneyMe

Lender strengths and weaknesses

• BDM quality is an industry strength with satisfaction at 79%, and was cited as an important deciding factor by 90% of brokers.
  
  
• Product pricing is important to 86% of brokers; however, satisfaction landed only at 75%, a weakness for the industry as a whole.
  
  
• Non-banks led broker ratings in technology, landing at 78%. 

Overall, product policy is the leading driver for broker recommendations at 93. Credit assessment and BDMs are also cited as highly important factors by 92% and 90% of brokers, respectively. 

This year, BDM quality acquired a satisfaction rate of 79%, the second-highest factor next to settlement at 80%. By contrast, product pricing has the lowest satisfaction rating of 75%, despite being deemed an important factor for 88% of brokers. 

In other news, non-bank lenders have scored high in the areas of technology (78%) and support (78%), exceeding all other lender types. By contrast, major banks top the ranking in the product category (79%). 

About the report

Broker Pulse’s Third-Party Lending Report is an annual review of Australia’s residential mortgage lenders in the past 12 months as evaluated by over 700 residential mortgage brokers. Survey responses were collected between 17 February and 30 April 2026.

You can download the report here.