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The gloves are officially off as lenders go head to head, stepping up efforts to increase market share - and that’s good news for brokers, according to St George’s Clive Kirkpatrick, who tells BrokerTV competition is fierce in the banking space.
“Well this year, I think, is far more competitive than past years from a lender’s perspective, which is great for the customer and the broker. From St George’s perspective, we will continue to run this year with a number of customer-related campaigns, as we did last year, so that always gives something for the broker to talk to their customer about. I see this year as being really tough for lenders as we strive to gain more market share.”
Kirkpatrick says the St George has made significant inroads on turnaround times, with more plans in the pipeline to improve its service proposition to brokers.
“We’ve really focused in on our…application to approval piece. So we’ve invested and put a lot more people in. We’ve upped the number of people in our back office by about 20%. We’re now running consistently in day-one across all segments and products. So we’re really happy with where that’s gone. The brokers were telling us they really wanted to talk to a credit decision-maker, so we’ve actually moved our scenarios line into what we now call the 'mortgage hot line' and they are now talking to an experienced credit manager.”
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