"I believe anyone who’s promoting themselves as a mortgage broker should be required to belong to the Mortgage Brokers Association, to be a qualified and accredited member," Oliver says.
"I believe the public deserve that protection. It would weed out the people in the industry that I think are parasites. Those people are giving al the industry a bad name," he says.
The industry has recently been debating the merits or otherwise of formal regulation. Currently, mortgage brokers aren't covered by any form of regulatory control and anyone can call themselves a broker. Only about half New Zealand’s mortgage brokers currently are MBA members.
One of the obstacles to getting the industry regulated as Oliver sees it is that organisations like Sovereign and AMP receive a lot of mortgage applications from their insurance sales people and so are reluctant to have regulation enforced.
"I don’t go along with that. I don’t believe insurance and mortgages go hand in hand. I don’t do insurance. Likewise, I don’t believe and insurance person, unless they’re experienced, should do the lending side," Oliver says.
Generally speaking, he thinks a person can do one job well or the other, but not both.
"If the industry won’t regulate itself then, yes, I believe it should be done by the government. If the industry won’t take the hard decisions it will have to come from somewhere else," he says.
