Legal information

Disclosure | Important information about our business

About Us

Colab Financial Limited (trading as Colab Mortgages) is a New Zealand owned financial services provider specialising in mortgages & lending. 

Colab Mortgages holds a Financial Advice Provider licence issued by the Financial Markets Authority to provide financial advice services. Colab Mortgages Financial Services Provider Number is FSP1008335.

Our address is 14 Tanglewood Place, Cockle Bay, Auckland 2014 and we can be contacted at info@colab.kiwi or +6421913663, www.colab.kiwi.

Nature and Scope of Financial Advice Services  

We provide advice to our clients about home loan and lending products for personal and investment purposes, including new purchases, refinancing, top-ups, pre-approvals, refix, restructure and debt consolidation.

We will also guide you through the process of buying property and help you navigate your due diligence.

We are a team of banking and financial advice professionals with decades of property and finance experience. 

The product providers we might recommend are as follows: ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Westpac, Kiwibank, AIA, Co-operative Bank, Heartland Bank, SBS, TSB, ASAP Finance, Avanti, Basecorp, Bizcap, Cressida Capital, DBR, First Mortgage Trust, Funding Partners, Liberty, Pepper Money, Plus Finance, Prospa, Pallas Capital, Southern Cross Partners and Unity. 

We do not provide financial advice services relating to, legal or estate planning (e.g. wills, trusts, contracts, etc, general insurance advice, personal insurance advice or investment products (e.g. shares, bonds, managed funds, KiwiSaver, etc.) 

You will need to consult an appropriate specialist if you would like advice on the above, in some cases we can help with recommendations.

Our Duties and Obligations to you

We are bound by the duties of the law when we provide services to you, including to:

• Give priority to your interests.  

• Exercise care, diligence and skill.

• Meet the standards of competence, knowledge, and skill set out in the Code of Professional Conduct for Financial Advice Services. 

• Meet the standards of ethical behaviour, conduct, and client care set out in the Code of Professional Conduct for Financial Advice Services.

Fees and how we get paid 

Our services, including the advice we provide, is usually at no cost to you. In most cases we are paid by the lender, through an upfront commission when a loan is settled, ranging from 0.40% - 0.90% of the loan amount. Some lenders pay us a trail commission for the ongoing servicing of your loan which ranges from 0.10%-0.20%. Alternatively, we may receive a fixed rate rollover fee of $150 should we assist in refixing your loan with a product provider that does not provide trail commission.

In the following situations, a service fee may apply:

• An upfront commission is not offered by the product provider your loan will be sourced through;

• The services we provide you are advisory in nature or involve a significant amount of work that will not result in a commissionable transaction; 

• Your loan is expected to be repaid within a short timeframe and thus incur a full commission clawback.

Any proposed service fee will be discussed with you as soon as it becomes clear that it will be required and will only be charged following your formal acceptance of that fee.

All commission and any fees are paid directly to Colab Financial Limited and used to remunerate the financial adviser that provides the advice, as well as cover the operating expenses associated with running our business including rent, staff, accounting, marketing, legal and IT costs. 

We may have referral relationships with third parties such as real estate agents, builders, accountants, insurance advisers and other professionals. In some cases, this may result in Colab receiving a referral fee or commission. This may be a fixed fee or a percentage of a transaction. Any referral we make will be made only upon your request and is based on what we believe is in your best interests. Where we receive a financial benefit from a referral, this will be disclosed to you. These arrangements do not influence the advice we provide, and we remain committed to prioritising your interests at all times.

Clawback Recovery Fee

If a loan is repaid within 27 months of settlement (the ‘Clawback Period’), we may have some or all of the original upfront commission ‘clawed back’ by the product provider.

To ensure that we are fairly compensated for the services originally provided to you, we may seek to recover some or all of this cost from you via a clawback recovery fee.

Our clawback recovery fee is calculated by charging our hourly rate for the amount of time we spent on your application e.g. $200 per hour x 15 hours = $3,000 clawback recovery fee.

Examples of when we may charge you a clawback cost recovery fee include:

• The property is refinanced within the clawback period and we were not given the opportunity to arrange the refinance;

• The property is sold and/or the loan repaid within the clawback period. 

The above cost recovery will not apply if:

• We were given the opportunity, but were unable to secure the subsequent lending or refinance approval.

• An upfront fee was agreed and paid by the Client when the loan was originally drawn and no commission was received. This would be the case with most short-term loan contracts.

• At our discretion, the early repayment of the mortgage was driven by a genuine change of circumstances and you communicated this to us as early as you could.

Should we need to charge you a fee, you will be invoiced and will be given 30 days to make payment.

Other costs 

Where other costs are incurred in the process of providing our advice and services to you, you will be liable for these costs. 

Conflicts of interest or other incentives

We are here for our clients and to advise you as best we can. Your interests are our priority although we do have business relationships with product providers who pay us commission. 

From time to time our product providers may also assist us with funding so we can bring our advisers together for conferences and professional development training.

We may refer clients to third parties for services outside our scope and in some cases we receive a referral fee or commission. We only refer to providers we believe act in your best interests.

How we manage any conflicts of interest 

To ensure our advisers prioritise our clients’ interests:

• We follow an advice process that ensures our recommendations are made appropriately, based on clients’ goals and circumstances.

• All our advisers undergo annual training about how to manage conflicts of interest. 

• We maintain registers of conflicts of interest and the gifts and incentives we receive. These registers are monitored regularly, and additional training is provided as required.

• We undertake an annual independent Compliance Assurance Review.