In the wake of a challenging year, NAB remains committed to growing its broker channel and will review broker clawback policies in 2024.
Adam Brown, the bank's new executive of broker distribution, emphasised the broker channel's importance, stating, “We are the bank behind the broker. It is in our DNA.”
Broker market share, clawbacks on brokers’ minds, says NAB
Brown, who joined NAB in 2007 and assumed his current role in October, addressed broker issues in the bank's final Forward View Market Update for the year. He highlighted the broker channel as a “key priority” for the bank, underscoring its unwavering support for brokers.
“A total of 70% of our home loans in the country are originated through brokers and within NAB, it's somewhere around 63% to 64% of all our loans are introduced through the broker network,” said Brown.
“Over the course of the next 12 months, it’s probably going to increase truth be told, and that's what I'm what I'm really looking forward to.”
The other issue “on the minds of brokers”, according to Brown, was clawbacks.
“I want to take this opportunity to mention we're looking at clawback now,” Brown said. “We're reviewing our position on that and I'm looking forward to the early part of 2024 in giving an update and letting brokers know what that's going to look like for us going forward.”
Looking back over the year, Brown said NAB is currently in “pretty good shape”.
“We've made some changes to the way we're structured throughout the year based on the feedback we've received,” Brown said.
This included bolstering its BDM and relationship managers who had to deal with increased refinancing activity, with Brown saying the team “had done a wonderful job”.
“We're also back in the market with our white label business,” said Brown, mentioning his love for this space after an extensive stint at Advantedge. “We've received a lot of support from brokers. Being in the market with a competitive offering is wonderful, and it complements our NAB offering.”
Brown also mentioned the positive broker feedback he received after NAB scrapped its cashback offer in July.
“Brokers said they appreciate this move,” said Brown. “They say it’s taking the complexity out of the market, and they don't have to explain it to customers now. I think that has simplified things a little bit.”
“Overall, brokers are telling us we're doing a great job with our branding. Our net promoter score of +38 from our brokers is something that we're really proud of.”
With the strain of rising costs of living, these are challenging times for many Australians.
Wellbeing remains well below the average as anxiousness continues to rise with the price of a shopping basket, according to NAB’s Australian Wellbeing Survey.
“It's an interesting time for our customers ... They are a bit stretched,” said Brown. “They’ve already made lifestyle decisions to adjust to increasing interest rates and cost of living.”
Brown said this made brokers even more crucial in the current environment.
“We will support them when they come to us, but they will quite often reach out to their broker first. What that means is that our brokers have a really important role to play in helping support their customers.”
The other customer trend Brown had seen was the rapid increase of refinancing rates, as customers rolled off low fixed rates into a new environment.
“We had a real peak of fixed people taking our fixed rates two years ago. We're about 60% of the way through, we’ve still got 40% of our customers rolling our fixed rates over the next 18 months,” Brown said.
“And part of that roll off is helping customers adjust to different repayments when they do roll off.”
Brown said NAB had “really invested” in that part of the businesses to help those customers, adding 140 people into support roles.
“How we support our customers is going to be critical to helping our customers continue to adapt, because whilst they've made adjustments already, the outlook is still tough.”
Despite this tough outlook, Brown said overall, customers were in “a really good position”.
“We are optimistic about the economy. And we're really optimistic about how customers will navigate through that and the role we play in supporting them.”
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