Dealing With Us

Compliance and disclosure obligations

The National Consumer Credit Protection Regulations require certain information to be given to you to help you make decisions about dealing with us, understanding your rights if you do deal with us and understanding any contracts that are offered to you. This information is provided in our Credit Guide, Quote & Proposal Document.

Credit guide, quote & proposal document

Part 1: credit guide

The Credit Guide tells you who we are, how you may contact us and provides you with information about our internal and external dispute resolution procedures and contact details. It also includes information about the services we provide, the remuneration and other benefits we may receive, our panel lenders, referrer arrangements, your disclosure obligations to us and our privacy disclosure and consent statement.

Part 2: quote

The Quote tells you about the services we provide, the estimated cost of using our services and when the fees are payable. Under NCCP regulations, you must accept the quote by signing and dating it before we can provide you with credit assistance.

Part 3: credit proposal

The Proposal includes information about the proposed loan(s) including product information, funding, an estimate of fees payable by you to the lender (if any), the commissions and other benefits we expect to receive and commission splits / referral fees payable by us to third parties.

Attachments include the following documents:

• Funding report
• Cost / Product Comparison Reports
• Product Brochure
• Fixed v Variable Interest Rate Fact Sheet
• Client Assessment Report
• Client Declaration, Acknowledgement & Consent
• Invoice for brokerage fees payable at settlement

Before we can lodge an application for you, you need to sign the Quote, Client Assessment, Client Declaration, Acknowledge & Consent and Invoice. An application will then be submitted to the lender for consideration. The lender will make a Final Assessment and depending on lender volumes, an answer is usually expected within 5 to 10 working days. If an application for pre-approval is requested, the funding will be finalised once you have agreed to purchase a property and an application for formal approval will then be lodged with the lender.

Your disclosure obligations

Under the NCCP Act, we are obliged to ensure that any loan or principal increase to a loan we help you to obtain is not unsuitable for you. To do this, you need to provide us with all relevant information that enables us to assess whether the loan is not unsuitable. The law requires us to:

• Make reasonable inquiries about your requirements and objectives
• Make reasonable inquiries about your financial situation
• Take reasonable steps to verify that financial situation

Credit will be unsuitable if at the time of the assessment, it is likely that at the time the credit is provided:

• You could not pay or could only pay with substantial hardship
• You cannot satisfy lender requirements
• The credit will not meet your requirements and objectives

For example, if you can only repay by selling your principal place of residence, it is presumed that the loan will cause substantial hardship unless the contrary is proved. For this reason we must ask you to provide a significant amount of information. It is therefore very important that the information you provide us is accurate.

If we give you credit assistance we will provide you with a copy of our preliminary credit assessment.

Panel lenders

We source finance from a panel of lenders. Subject to meeting the lender’s credit criteria we are able to obtain credit for you from these lenders. These lenders do not necessarily represent all the lenders who offer credit of the nature you seek. Full details will be disclosed to you in your Credit Guide, Quote & Proposal Document.

Commissions payable to us by lenders

When your loan settles, we are paid a commission by the lender. Upfront commissions, based on the original loan amount, are usually paid about one month after settlement. The amount paid may be clawed back by the Lender if a loan is repaid within twelve months. A partial claw back may apply between twelve and twenty four months. Trail commissions may be paid, based on the outstanding monthly loan balance. Full details will be disclosed to you in your Credit Guide, Quote & Proposal Document.

Fees payable by you

We may charge you a brokerage fee that is deducted from the loan settlement funds. The amount payable will depend on the level and type of services provided. We will advise you of the amount of the brokerage fee after our initial fact finding interview. Full details will be disclosed to you in your Credit Guide, Quote & Proposal Document.

Other benefits we may receive

We may receive other benefits from credit providers from time to time. These include financial benefits related to the achievement of aggregator sales volume targets and non-material benefits such as training and social events that are not directly related to the submission and approval of your loan. Full details of such payments are held by Custom Equity Group and are available at PO Box 118 Collaroy NSW 2097. We do not believe that these benefits will influence our recommendation to you.

Referral fees & commission payable by us

Referrals are a vital part of our business. We wish to develop a long-term relationship with you and are very keen for you to refer us to your friends and associates. We may also receive referrals from a broad range of sources. We may pay referral fees to real estate agents, accountants, lawyers and other third parties for referring you to us. These referral fees are generally small amounts and accord with usual business practice. We also have service agreement obligations that require us to split lender commissions with our third party service providers. These amounts are not payable by you. Full details will be disclosed to you in your Credit Guide, Quote & Proposal Document.

Dispute resolution

We hope you are delighted with our services and value your feedback. If you have a complaint we will do our best to resolve it as soon as possible. We believe that it is essential for our clients to be able to identify and deal with someone who has the ability, authority and proper training to hear and respond appropriately to any complaints or disputes. We are a member of the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA) and as such we are also subject to the requirement to have in place an Internal Dispute Resolution procedure.

Receiving complaints

You can lodge a complaint by contacting: The Complaints Officer at PO Box 118 Collaroy NSW 2097, Telephone: 1300 826 763, Email: info@customequitygroup.com.au

When lodging a complaint, you should explain the details of your complaint as clearly as you can. You may do this verbally or in writing. When the complaint is received, we will attempt to resolve it promptly. We will observe the following principles in handling your complaint:

• There is no requirement for face-to-face contact between you and us, although it may be useful for us to come to a satisfactory resolution
• We expect that both parties will make a genuine attempt to resolve a complaint promptly
• We expect that both parties will provide all essential and relevant information, documents, written statements and any other materials that may properly and reasonably be believed to assist in resolving the complaint
• We expect that both parties will comply with all reasonable requests from the other party to provide information within a reasonable time frame

Our external dispute resolution scheme

If we do not reach agreement on your complaint, you may refer the complaint to our ASIC approved external dispute resolution provider, Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), telephone: 1800 931 678, website: www.afca.org.au. This is a free service established to provide you with an independent mechanism to resolve specific complaints.