The mortgage industry needs to take a ‘good, hard look’ at its productivity – but so do lenders, says CBA’s Kathy Cummings, who tells Broker TV that improving work flow is a business imperative, particularly in a low credit growth environment.
“We all know with the rather flat credit growth environment we’re in, it’s been tough. So therefore we need to look at, how can we reduce overheads? How can we work more effectively? How can we move waste, stop errors and re-work? We know that the increased regulatory environment…has put additional overheads and costs in there. So we need to work together to try and remove all these things that affect the brokers’ work day, and affects ours.”
Cummings says CBA will be conducting its own internal review of its home loan process in coming months.
“We have a saying inside CBA that ‘there’s nothing so ineffective as doing something efficiently that shouldn’t be done at all’. So one of the things we’re doing is focusing on our productivity and on our processes. We’ll be starting an end-to-end review of our total home loan process later on this year.”
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She says CBA has recently completed a review of its credit processes and have recommendations on that issue for the third party piece.
“We do listen and things like we’re just piloting a new AVM (Automatic Valuation Method ) process for valuations is one of the things where we’re looking at to cut-out rework and give brokers a more efficient and effective answer to their queries.”
However, Cunnings says it’s not just up to banks when it comes to improving the efficiency of the home loan application process – brokers need to do their part as well.
“I think all brokers…should have a very clear business plan. Importantly, and you’d be amazed at what we’ve seen, they need to have a clean workspace for themselves and for their staff. Things like doing a 5-S workshop that we do in the Kaizen Lean program, means that we’ll focus on getting their workspace nice and clean for them so they can actually find their files and they can actually see their monitor.”
To view the full interview with Kathy Cummings, click here
