Financial Services Mystery Shopping: Test Conduct, Compliance and Customer Experience

• We test the moments that matter for a bank, lender, broker or insurer: sales conduct, best-interest duty observation, mortgage and lending enquiry handling, and complaint resolution.
• Our shoppers report against the conduct and disclosure expectations set by ASIC and the Banking Code of Practice, so findings map to obligations your compliance team already owns.
• We assess vulnerable-customer treatment, because the way a frontline team responds to financial hardship or distress is often where conduct risk hides.
• We cover every channel your customers use: branch, phone, web chat and online application, so you see the full enquiry-to-outcome journey.
• You receive structured, evidence-based reporting your team can act on, not opinion, with verbatim notes, scoring against your own scripts, and clear next steps.

Financial products are bought infrequently, carry long-term consequences, and are sold by people. That combination is exactly why conduct matters. A mortgage, a personal loan or an insurance policy can shape a customer’s finances for years, so the quality of the conversation at the point of enquiry is not a soft metric. It is a risk signal.

We design each programme around the conduct and outcomes you are accountable for. Our researchers behave like genuine prospects, ask the questions a real customer would ask, and record what happens against a standard you set with us. We look at whether staff explain product features and risks plainly, whether they ask enough about a customer’s situation before recommending anything, and whether the customer leaves understanding what they have agreed to.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has used its own shopper-style research to test how financial advice and credit are sold, including a national review of personal financial advice. You can read about that approach in ASIC’s report on how large institutions manage conflicts of interest. We bring the same evidence-gathering discipline to your frontline so you can see issues before a regulator or an external dispute does.

The most valuable thing we observe is whether a sale serves the customer or the target. Our shoppers test for the behaviours that sit underneath good conduct: needs discovery before recommendation, balanced disclosure of fees and risks, no pressure to commit on the spot, and a clear explanation of alternatives.

For credit and lending enquiries, this connects directly to obligations around responsible lending and acting in the customer’s interest. We can structure scenarios that probe how a lender or broker handles a borderline borrower, an applicant who volunteers signs of financial stress, or a customer who clearly does not understand the product. The Australian Banking Association sets industry conduct expectations through the Banking Code of Practice, and we frame conduct findings against those commitments so they land with your governance and risk teams.

Common conduct issues we surface:

• Recommendations made before the staff member understood the customer’s needs or capacity.
• Fees, exit costs or comparison rates skated over or not mentioned.
• High-pressure or urgency tactics used to close on the first contact.
• Scripted compliance statements rushed or read in a way the customer would not absorb.
• Cross-sell of additional products with no link to the customer’s stated goal.

Customers rarely use one channel. They start an enquiry online, ring the call centre, then walk into a branch, and the experience should hold together across all three. We shop each channel against the same conduct standard so you can compare consistency and spot where a strong branch is undermined by a weak phone queue, or where an online journey quietly drops applicants who would have converted with a single call.

How a financial institution responds when something goes wrong, or when a customer is struggling, tells you more about its culture than any sales metric. We design discreet scenarios that test complaint handling end to end: whether the complaint is acknowledged, treated fairly, resolved or escalated properly, and whether the customer is told about their right to take an unresolved matter further.

External disputes are visible and measurable. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority publishes complaint data, and in its own reporting it has noted year-on-year increases in complaints reaching the scheme. Many of those start as a frontline interaction that could have been handled better. Testing complaint handling before disputes escalate is one of the clearest ways to protect both customers and your own conduct record.

Vulnerable-customer treatment is woven through every programme we run. We can build scenarios where a shopper signals financial hardship, confusion, age-related difficulty or distress, then record whether the staff member slows down, offers support, avoids pushing a product, and follows your hardship process. This is sensitive work, and we treat it with care, but it is often where the most important findings come from.

Evidence only helps if your team trusts it and can act on it. Every shop we deliver is scored against a framework we agree with you up front, usually built from your own scripts, conduct standards and the obligations in the Banking Code and ASIC guidance. Reporting includes verbatim observations, scoring by behaviour, channel-by-channel comparison, and a clear read on where conduct or experience falls short.

Because we are an independent research agency, our findings carry weight inside compliance, risk and customer-experience functions. We are based in Perth and work across Western Australia and nationally, so we can run consistent programmes across a branch network or a single contact centre. You can see how we approach this work on our mystery shopping Perth page, and read more about the wider value on our guide to the benefits of mystery shopping for business and our benefits overview.

If you run a bank, lender, brokerage or insurer and you want hard evidence of how your sales conduct, compliance and complaint handling hold up in the real world, we can help. Start with our work on mystery shopping Perth, or Talk to our team about a programme built around your channels, your scripts and your obligations.