Mortgage brokers: professional indemnity requirements in Australian Capital Territory
Cover for legal liability arising from professional advice or services, written on a claims-made basis.
Data as at
Verified for Australian Capital Territory
- Licence liability condition: Yes, in substance. The National Credit Act requires a licensee to have "adequate arrangements in place for compensating your consumers for any loss they might suffer" if it breaches its obligations, and ASIC's position is that "for most applicants, the way to comply with this obligation is to have adequate professional indemnity (PI) insurance cover". The statute requires compensation arrangements; PI insurance is the ordinary means of meeting them. ACT · effective 2010-07-01 ASIC · 2026-08-24
- Licence evidence required: At licence application. ASIC must confirm adequate PI insurance is held where required, and asks for a certificate of currency — a summary of the policy from the insurer or broker. The compensation obligation continues for as long as the licence is held. ACT · effective 2010-07-01 ASIC · 2026-08-24
- Licensing body: ASIC, under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (Cth) — FEDERAL law, so there is no ACT mortgage broker licence and none is needed. The credential is an Australian credit licence, or authorisation as a credit representative of a licensee, and it operates in the Australian Capital Territory on the same terms as everywhere else. ACT · effective 2010-07-01 ASIC · 2026-08-24
What contracts commonly ask for
Principals and head contractors set their own insurance requirements, and those are frequently higher than a licence condition. The requirement that binds is the higher of the two, and both have to be read from the actual document.
What this cover costs
This site publishes no cost benchmark for this cover. A benchmark needs a real sample of documents, and none is published until the sample is large enough to compute a median honestly. A benchmark from a handful of policies is a guess with a decimal point.
Sources
- ASIC — Australian Securities and Investments Commission