Fact Find Automation: Why Are Brokers Still Manually Entering Client Data?

Most brokers still type client data into the fact find by hand, even when every figure is already sitting in a document the client has sent. Fact find automation reads those documents and fills the fact find in for you, so your job becomes checking the numbers rather than typing them.

For years, a "digital" fact find mostly meant a PDF instead of paper. The form changed. The bottleneck didn't.

When we ask brokers why they still re-key everything, we hear the same three answers. Each one made sense once. Each is worth another look.

"I can't risk getting the figures wrong"

Fair enough. Every number in a fact find has to be accurate and defensible, and ASIC expects brokers to gather and verify the right information before recommending a loan (RG 273). It's your name on the file.

But manual re-keying is where most errors come from: a transposed figure from a bank statement, a liability that never made it across, an income copied from the wrong document. Automation gives you a draft pulled straight from the source documents, and you still review every field. The check stays. The typing goes.

"My clients' information is all over the place"

It usually is. Some of it is in the aggregator platform, some in email attachments, some in portal uploads. Automation doesn't need it tidy first. The client or the broker uploads whatever's on hand, Effi's Smart Fill automation identifies each document's type (a Medicare card, a driver's licence, a notice of assessment), tags it, separates what's relevant from what isn't, and pulls the relevant details into the fact find. If something can't be read, manual entry is still right there. It's also why running loans in a generic CRM like HubSpot or Pipedrive gets messy: the documents and the fact find end up living somewhere else.

"It's always been done this way"

This one's honest, and it's the most expensive. Re-keying a single client's financials can take 30 to 60 minutes per file, and that time doesn't shrink as you grow. Clients feel it too. A slow, repetitive intake is reason enough for them to go elsewhere.

And there are more of them to win than ever. Brokers wrote a record 81.6% of new home loans in the June 2026 quarter (MFAA). With more brokers competing for each enquiry, the brokerages pulling ahead are the ones converting the highest share of the leads they already have.

Starting the fact find before the lead reaches you

Since we first wrote this, we've launched the Effi Widget, which runs a mini fact find on your own website as the client enters their details. By the time the lead lands in Effi, part of the fact find is already done.

A task that used to take up to an hour becomes a review pass. If you'd like to see that on your own files, book a demo.