Bank to broker: will your clients follow? Two bankers, two answers

Some of your bank clients will follow you into broking, some will not, and each one who does needs a reason to move their loan. A home lending executive at a major bank told us most of theirs would come. A senior agribanker told us anyone expecting the whole book is naive. Neither was counting on it.

The bottom line: Plan a bank to mortgage broker transition as if the book stays at the bank, and treat every client who follows as a bonus. FinTalent hears this move from both desks, bankers pricing the pay cut and principals weighing whether a banker can find clients without a bank brand behind them.

Will my bank clients follow me into broking?

The first is a home lending executive at a major bank, weighing a move to the broker side. They raised their back book themselves, the higher-value clients they had looked after for years who had said they would love to stay with the executive. They told us their lending clients would follow them, “most of them if not all of them”.

They still go in with the mindset that they have no back book, “because otherwise it’s just basically changing the logo”. Anyone who follows is “a bonus”, and the executive does not want to rely on them “for my bread and butter”.

The second is a senior agribanker with a large rural book. When Joe asked them what would stop those clients following them, the agribanker pushed back twice. In rural lending, they said, not everyone picks up and leaves, and “anyone that believes that’s the case is probably a bit naive”. The realistic outcome is that “you’ll get a percentage of it”. They worked out they would have to write a fair bit, for a few years, to match their pay at the bank, and the seat on the table did not appeal to them at that point.

The research leans the agribanker’s way. In a Deloitte survey for the MFAA, 58% of borrowers who went direct to a lender chose it for their existing banking relationship, and 65% would go straight back to the same lender. Broker customers chose on personal relationships, and 73% would use the same broker again (Deloitte for the MFAA, 2016). A 2023 survey for the FBAA found 27% of borrowers who dealt directly with a lender had complete trust in their representative, against 44% of broker clients (The Adviser).

A bank customer’s loyalty mostly sits with the bank, and the banker’s share of it is smaller than it feels from the inside. Neither banker was counting on the whole book.

What has to happen for a bank client to follow you?

A client following you means writing them a new loan, whether that is a refinance, a purchase or a top-up. A home loan that is working fine at the bank has no reason to move.

Mortgage brokers have worked under the best interests duty since 1 January 2021 (ASIC RG 273). A banker turned broker who refinances a former customer has to show the new loan serves that customer, whatever it does for the new book.

Then there is the contract you are leaving. Treasury released draft laws in September 2026 to ban non-compete clauses for workers earning under $190,100 (Treasury). The test counts base pay and leaves out most bonuses and commissions, and client non-solicitation clauses survive where they are reasonable and needed to protect client relationships (Baker McKenzie). If it passes as drafted, it covers contracts made or changed after it starts, so a banker on an older contract may still be bound by a non-compete, and a banker it does cover can still be barred from chasing the bank’s customers. The end of non-competes covers the background for brokers.

The clients who move are the ones with a reason to move, under a contract that lets you ask them. Check both before you count anyone.

What does a banker who knows one policy walk into?

A commercial brokerage principal told us quality candidates from corporate banking come in to interview and find their knowledge is narrow, “because they’re used to one policy, one credit appetite”. Then they see deals that do not fit that box and ask, in the principal’s words, “how do you guys do this?”

Asked whether the bank’s appetite had ever cost them a deal, the agribanker said no, anything they back gets approved. That is real skill, and it is skill at getting a deal over one lender’s line. Broking would ask them to pick the line. In 2025 the major banks took 43.88% of broker-originated residential lending by value, so more than half of what brokers write goes outside the big four (Australian Broker).

The qualification gap is real too. ASIC lets a bank set the training for staff who only arrange its own home loans. Anyone giving third-party home loan credit assistance needs at least a Certificate IV in Finance and Mortgage Broking and 20 hours of CPD a year (ASIC RG 206), and MFAA members need the Diploma within a year of joining (MFAA).

A banker brings real credit judgement. The map of a whole panel’s appetites gets built one file at a time.

Do ex-bankers skip the two-year broker mentoring?

Many get a shortened version, and some skip it. The MFAA says brokers with less than two years’ experience must engage a mentor for about two years (MFAA). Its mentoring standards let mentees with relevant prior experience go through recognition of prior learning, and they ask the mentor to vet every loan application until at least 12 have settled (MFAA Mentoring Standards).

In July 2026 an aggregator chief executive wrote in Mortgage Professional Australia that ex-bankers are routinely granted concessions on the two-year requirement, skipping it or doing a heavily reduced version (MPA). The chief executive’s case is that credit knowledge does not make someone a broker, because a banker has never worked under the best interests duty or had their own files reviewed one by one the way a broker’s are. Read it as opinion from someone with a stake, because their group runs a shorter mentoring stream built for bankers.

For the banker, a waived program looks like time saved. For the principal, it moves the mentoring onto their desk. Somebody still has to ask the questions the chief executive’s column lists, about where the leads come from, who is referring them and whose interests each file serves, and in a small brokerage that is the principal or nobody.

A mentoring concession recognises what a banker already knows. It does nothing for the part of broking they have never done, which is finding the client and choosing the lender.

How big is the pay cut from bank to broker?

Bigger than the base suggests. Our salary guide puts a mobile banker or lender at a typical $120k base in Melbourne and $135k in Sydney, against $85k to $110k nationally for a broker with two to five years behind them.

A lender who left a major bank for a smaller brokerage took a cut of roughly $40k to $50k a year in cash pay, bonus included. They knew what they were giving up at the bank: “there’s so much structure, there’s so much training, there’s so much help.” Losing it was fine for them, they said, and they have watched others walk in “thinking that they would get a lot more support than what they have”. With kids and a mortgage, the lender needed a salary while a book built.

A business banker whose last role paid $120k told us they would take “$20K, $30K” less to learn inside a brokerage. They want to own a customer “from initial stage to settlement, liaise with different lenders”, and they have only ever worked for lenders. The seat they went for is a support role, and the broker seat they want is a year or two away if it comes. A bank lender between roles, weighing commission-only seats as the sole breadwinner at home, said they might be successful in six months, then asked “what if I’m not?”

Then there is trail. A banker arrives with none, and in 2025 median gross trail revenue per broker was $77,894, up 18.7% (MPA). That is a gross figure before splits and costs, and it is income a new broker starts at zero. The trail book calculator shows what a given book pays in trail each year.

The base gap is the number bankers price. The missing trail, the missing support and the months before a pipeline pays are the costs that bite in year one. If you are earlier in a lending career, banking or broking for entry-level lenders covers the first choice.

What does a principal fear when hiring a banker?

That the banker cannot find their own clients. At the bank, the brand and the branch fed the pipeline, which is what the Deloitte figure of 58% describes. At a brokerage the leads come from referrers, repeat clients and whatever the principal hands over, and a banker who has always been fed can stall. If the seat promises leads, ask what that means in numbers.

One principal whose hires from banking did not work out put much of it on themselves. Maybe the base was too low to get quality, they said, and they were doing little training at the time. They now take new hires through every step. The principal’s account is in our guide to the experience you can afford, and hiring for attitude over experience covers why a banker’s CV undersells them.

Principals keep looking at bankers anyway, because the work is growing faster than the headcount. Brokers wrote 81.6% of new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter, up from 77.6% a year earlier (Australian Broker). In 2025 loans settled through brokers rose 17.2% to 838,815 while the broker population rose 9.1% to 24,116 (Australian Broker). Where new brokers come from looks at who is filling that gap.

The majors are building their own lending channels. NAB took on about 270 proprietary bankers in FY2025, and Westpac’s proprietary share rose to 34% (Australian Broker). NAB’s home lending drawdowns through its own channels rose from 47.7% in the first half of its financial year to 50.9% in the June quarter (NAB). A brokerage hiring a good home lender is competing with the bank’s own channel for them.

Joe runs every FinTalent search himself, and the two questions he put to the agribanker work on any banker: what would stop your clients following you, and what deals has the bank’s appetite turned away? Our mortgage broker recruitment page sets out how the search runs.