Compliance note: Information only, not legal or financial advice. Confirm your AFCA obligations and dispute pathways with AFCA or a qualified professional before relying on this for compliance decisions.
AFCA is the single external dispute resolution scheme for financial services, credit and superannuation complaints in Australia. It commenced on 1 November 2018, replacing three legacy schemes, and its decisions are binding on financial firms up to the current monetary caps.
Before AFCA, an Australian consumer chasing a complaint about a bank, broker, super fund or insurer had to navigate three different bodies depending on the product: the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), the Credit and Investments Ombudsman (CIO), or the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal (SCT). AFCA's About page confirms it consolidated those three schemes into one front door from day one. The simplification matters as much for the firms as the consumers, one scheme, one set of rules, one fee structure.
Membership is not optional for most regulated firms. Australian financial services licensees, Australian credit licensees, authorised credit representatives and superannuation trustees are required to be AFCA members under their licence conditions. AFCA reports more than 50,000 members nationally as a result, covering banks, general and life insurers, financial planners, mortgage brokers, fund managers and the rest of Australia's regulated finance landscape.
The monetary limits matter for both sides. From 1 January 2024, with the next indexation in 2027, AFCA can consider claims up to $1,263,000 from a consumer, or credit-facility disputes up to $6,317,000 for a small business or primary producer. Direct financial loss compensation is capped at $631,500 per claim, and non-financial loss at $6,300 per claim. Superannuation sits outside those caps, the remedy there is restoration, not compensation, so AFCA places the complainant as nearly as practicable in the position they would have been in without the unfair conduct.
For a mortgage broker, AFCA is where a client's complaint about your advice or the lender's conduct lands if internal dispute resolution doesn't resolve it. AFCA's framework sits below the Best Interests Duty, which is what conduct is measured against, and the Australian Credit Licence regime, which is what authorises the activity in the first place. A finding against a broker at AFCA has the practical effect of putting the broker's conduct on ASIC's radar, because ASIC monitors AFCA outcomes when assessing licensee fitness.
The asymmetry to remember: AFCA's binding decisions bind the firm, not the consumer. A consumer can reject an outcome and continue to court; a firm cannot. The framework was designed deliberately to lower the barrier for consumer access, and it operates as the working accountability rail behind every Australian financial services and credit licence.
The live test of that design is running right now. The 2025 collapse of the Shield Master Fund and First Guardian Master Fund left around 11,000 Australians with superannuation and savings at risk; AFCA reports 500 simultaneous investigations and 44 decisions issued so far including five lead decisions, and AFCA also reported a record number of complaints in calendar 2025 across all jurisdictions. For an Australian financial firm in 2026, AFCA is not a quiet end-of-line dispute body, it is the front-line accountability surface for the year.
For the regulator above AFCA, see ASIC.