It seems sensible to shop around — try a couple of lenders, see who comes back with the best deal. For most things in life, that’s good advice. For finance, it can quietly cost you. Here’s what actually happens to your credit file every time you apply, and how to shop around properly without doing the damage yourself.
Every hard enquiry costs you
Applying anywhere — or even just using a lender’s “check your borrowing power” tool — puts a hard enquiry on your credit file, and your score drops for it. It’s not a small dent either: a single enquiry can cost you 30, 50, sometimes more points. Some lenders will only accept ONE enquiry showing on your file in the last six months. Turn up with two — even from two reputable big banks — and they simply won’t deal with you. To them it doesn’t read as a shopper doing due diligence, it reads as desperation: you’ve already been to someone else recently, they must have said no, so why would we say yes? For the full list of what else drags a score down, see our guide on improving your credit score before you apply.
Brokers can look without leaving a mark
Here’s the part most people don’t know: brokers have the ability to run a soft-touch credit check. We can read your file and tell you exactly where you stand — without it landing as an enquiry, and without it affecting your score. A lender legally can’t do that when they’re assessing you for a loan; a broker can, before anything is ever submitted. It’s the cheapest piece of insurance in the whole process: know your position first, before anything touches your file.
Not all brokers protect you — how to pick one
Being a broker doesn’t automatically mean your file is being protected. Plenty of volume-driven brokers spend as little time as possible working out where your deal actually fits — docs land, and the application goes straight out to two or three lenders at once, hoping one sticks. Then you get the call: “great news, three approvals, take your pick!” Sounds great. The problem is those are three hard enquiries on your file, not theirs. At 30 points an enquiry that’s 90, potentially 150 points gone — you’ve gone from a decent score to a mediocre one to get one loan. You got this deal, sure. But when you’re back in three or six months for the next truck, car or machine, that damage is sitting there working against you.
How we do it: one application, workshopped first
We make one application. We know the policies of our 40+ lenders inside out, and we’ve got a contact at each of them — some we’re speaking to multiple times a day. Where there’s any doubt about whether your deal actually fits a lender’s policy, we workshop it with them informally first: the rough shape of the deal, the issues we’ve flagged, whether they’d be interested — all before a single enquiry ever touches your file. Sometimes that conversation tells us the deal is technically outside policy but they’re happy to do it anyway; sometimes it tells us policy says yes but in reality they won’t. Either way, we find that out before it can turn into a decline on your file.
The 95% rule
If we’re not at least 95% sure a lender will approve, we don’t submit. If there’s a risk we can’t work around, we tell you upfront and the call to submit anyway is yours — we won’t make it for you. And in the unlikely event it does come back a decline, it’s one enquiry on your file, not three or five. More often than not, when we hold off, we come back with a recommendation instead: wait a few weeks for an older enquiry to age off your file, or a couple of months until you fit a policy you’re just short of today. Could be the score itself, could be an enquiry that needs time to fade, could be the business needing another month or two of trading history before more lenders open up.
Tell your broker everything — we’re on your side
One more thing, and it matters more than people realise: disclose everything to your broker. Some customers hold things back — a past default, a bankruptcy, a rough patch in trading, something on the record — thinking “the bank doesn’t need to know, they won’t find out.” They will find out. Lenders have entirely normal ways of finding everything — credit history, repayment conduct, how the business has really been trading. The problem is your broker places the deal based on what you’ve told them, and when the lender uncovers what was left out, it comes back as a decline that could have been completely avoided — with all the damage to your file and your future borrowing that comes with it.
We’ve seen it firsthand: deals declined purely because something was deliberately left out — when, had it been disclosed, we could have guided the customer through it and the loan would have been approved. Your broker isn’t the bank. We’re here to get you the best outcome, and we can only work around a problem we know about. Nothing you tell us hurts your application — it’s the things you don’t tell us that do.
Get in touch — it costs nothing and won’t touch your file
If you’re weighing up a truck, vehicle or equipment purchase, the smartest first move is a conversation with us before you go near an application form or a “check your borrowing power” button. The first conversation costs nothing and doesn’t touch your credit file — so there’s no downside to finding out where you actually stand.
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