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Macquarie is doing its level best to win friends in the broker circle, launching a TV ad campaign encouraging home buyers to visit their mortgage adviser.
James Casey, division director at Macquarie, tells BrokerTV the move was all about driving consumers to the broker channel, a crucial part of their business.
“When we knew we wanted to run with a TV program, it was second nature for us to make sure that the call to action was to ring our financial intermediaries. So, not a strategy as such, it was really part of what we do. They are the one channel that we operate with,so driving people to that channel is, as I say, second nature.”
Macquarie has been steadily making its mark since returning to the mortgage market in the recovery faze after the GFC and in an environment where banks continue to jostle for broker business, Casey says the road to redemption has been tougher than he anticipated.
“It’s been really difficult. I think in ways I certainly underestimated how long that journey would be and how tough that journey would be. Ninety-nine per cent of our mortgages go out through the mortgage broking third party channel and that is represented by 10,000 to 11,000 small businesses. So when we basically wound-back on new originations, definitely understood how that could hurt small businesses.”
In many ways without being immodest, says Casey, Macquarie’s success prior to 2008 amplified their decision.
#pb# “We really let a lot of people down. There’s no magic cure, except time and we’ve just got to continue to work hard to get back the people that we lost in 2008. We’ve been, I think, very successful so far but we’ve got a long way to go.”
Casey says Macquarie is listening to broker feedback and acting on it.
“One of the things we’ve done, apart from the advertising recently, is helping make our credit card bundled package loan a little bit more attractive. We heard the brokers basically saying people take the card because it’s part of the package, but they’re not using the card and it’s difficult to sell the package because our card really didn’t have the bells and whistles.”
To watch the full interview with James Casey, click here
