The biggest threat facing the mortgage broking industry is old age. The Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia is concerned that not enough young people are joining the industry, prompting it to start work on several programs to address the problem.The average age of MFAA members is 43 and has been rising over the past few years. The proportion of members under 30 has fallen from 11 per cent to six per cent over the past two years.Ninety per cent of new members last year were over 50.The MFAA chief executive, Phil Naylor, said: "We are not getting sufficient numbers of young people in to replace those who are retiring. We have to do something about it."The association has started participating in careers days at universities. Naylor said this had attracted some interest.It will also participate in the National Training Agency's next National Skills and Entrepreneurship Expo.And it is looking at an approach to government to ask for an allocation of funding for brokers to take on new staff under the Apprenticeships and Trainees system.Speaking at the opening of the MFAA national convention in Sydney yesterday, Naylor said the association's other preoccupation was to get the government to stop formulating new industry regulation."Enough is enough. We supported the National Consumer Credit Protection Act but now we are saying let the industry settle," he said.There are a number of anomalous outcomes from the regulation of the past few years that the MFAA would like to sort out before moving ahead with the next phase of credit law.Naylor said the prohibition on the use of the word "independent" in the business names of commission-based brokers has been extended by regulatory creep to a prohibition on brokers describing their businesses as independently owned."We have gone to the politicians on this," he said.Another issue that needs sorting is that some lenders' systems treat a loan variation as a new loan, requiring the brokers to go through the whole process of assessing the suitability of the loan under responsible lending provisions. The MFAA is also concerned that South Australia and Western Australia have developed verification of identity arrangements that differ from those of other states. "The whole idea of NCCP is that people have the same rules," Naylor said.