ME has celebrated the fifth birthday of its broker arm by reaching $1 billion worth of home loan applications and $640 million in loan settlements for the first time.
With both milestones reached in November, the bank’s general manager for broker sales, Lino Pelaccia, said the results were partially due to support from brokers.
“Despite only entering the broking market exactly five years ago, the broker channel already provides over half of ME’s home loan sales,” he said.
“Brokers are critical to ME’s growth plans so we’re continually adding and improving our broker service.”
To this end, Pelaccia said the bank had introduced a range of measures including bringing in desk-based relationship managers available from 9am to 5pm for new-to-bank brokers.
ME has also improved its BDM support team for faster response times.
“ME has increased its BDM team from nine to 15 employees and set up a team of seven state-based relationship managers,” Pelaccia told
Australian Broker.
“Our BDMs and relationship managers take care of relationships across their respective panels, which also include regional-based brokers.”
Additionally, the bank has also established a credit quality team to review paperwork as soon as it is received and notify brokers quickly if an application is incomplete.
“Furthermore, we’ve refreshed our home loan pricing structure based on LVR and loan-size, effectively tripling our pricing options, making us competitive across all market segments,” Pelaccia said.
In 2017, brokers can look forward to an important service change: the launch of ME’s new online broker portal, he added.
“The portal will let brokers access clients’ home loan accounts so they have more control and information about clients, both pre-and post-settlement.”
It will also help brokers retain customers, Pelaccia told
Australian Broker, and is scheduled to be launched in the second half of 2017.
ME continually invests in technology and process change to enhance the customer experience, he added.
“To achieve speedy and consistent turnaround times, we’re introducing new decision and valuation tools that will automatically assess credit policy, loan profile and available customer information in a matter of minutes.”
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