ANZ has released a missive to the broker channel clarifying the work that is taking place behind the scenes to improve turnaround times, with their average now down to seven days.
The bank has published a long blogpost interview with Group Executive Australia Retail & Commercial Mark Hand, with a long segment directly addressing the issues that the bank has faced since the pandemic began and housing volumes rose drastically.
In it, Hand confronts the issues that ANZ has faced and the release from APRA that suggested that their market share was falling.
“That’s a fair assessment of the last few months,” he said. “I would point out though that APRA stats are a pretty blunt measure of market share and we’re not necessarily going to chase share at all costs.”
“We’ve done a lot of work over the past 18 months on our processing capacity and we saw a very strong performance in the home loan business in the second half of last year.”
“What we didn’t predict however was the huge, sustained rise in application volumes in 2021, particularly in the refinance market with customers shifting to take up fixed rates.”
“This means we are now handling double the applications we were two years ago and unfortunately assessment times moved out to a level we weren’t happy with.”
“So what have we done? We have a dedicated team of people working hard to improve assessment times.”
“That’s been pretty successful with time to first decision – speaking on average here – down to about seven days for apps received from brokers.”
“That’s even faster for simple, PAYG applications and those applications that come through our own branches because these customers already bank with us it’s a lot easier as we already know a lot about them.”
“It does then take more time to get to a final decision, but were are working on ways to reduce the rework loops and limit to-and-fro to collect the information needed to give that final answer. We know that is frustrating for the lenders and customers.”
“This improvement in response time is largely due to both increased resourcing and reallocating existing resources, that is, more assessors as well as some process improvements and simplifying some of our policies.”
“The next critical step we are working on is automation of manual steps and processes, and that is going well and will set us up for future volume fluctuations.”
“We’ve had to be really focused on areas of the market that are key to our strategy and that’s very much around owner occupiers.”
“Really importantly we didn’t change our risk settings and we haven’t used the price lever to chase share for the sake of it.”
“We know we need to be competitive with pricing, but it is always with a focus on managing returns as well.”
“I can’t talk too much to margins and returns until we get to the full year earnings release but we’ve been pretty pleased with our disciplined approach here.”
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