The outgoing CEO of MyState Bank, Melos Sulicich, has opened up to Australian Broker on his final months in the job and what his bank is doing to improve its offering to the broker channel.
MyState posted its financial results for FY21 on Friday, the last time that Sulicich will preside over such an announcement before he calls it a day at the end of the year.
The Tasmanian bank celebrated 21% NPAT growth, despite the pandemic, and saw a 6.8% above system rise in home lending on the back of strong support from the broker channel.
Naturally, Sulicich was pleased with the success that MyState had enjoyed.
“I’m really happy with the position that the business is in at the moment,” he told Australian Broker. “As I said in the report on the results, June was a record high month for applications for MyState, and July was a bigger month again.”
“The business is growing really well at the moment and we’re providing a great service to our broker clients and to our retail customers. The business is in a great position to grow to the next level, and I’m looking forward to finishing up at the end of the year and letting someone take the reins from there.”
In terms of assisting the broker channel, Sulicich said that the results would now empower MyState to invest in support and tech advancements. It has recently added a new broker lead, Blake Albones, to oversee its future expansion in Victoria and New South Wales.
“Our aim is to give brokers a really good experience in using MyState,” he said. “We’re focused on service delivery and having a simple, easy to understand product set that is aimed at the broad population. When a broker makes an application with us, we want it to be easy and we want to give them an answer really quickly.”
“We’ve had a long-standing turnaround time of two days or less than two days to conditional approval, and around about a week to ten days for unconditional approval. We’re focused on getting that service delivery as fast and as crisp as possible for brokers so that they know the position that they’re in and the position that their customer is in.”
Tech, in particular, was allowing the bank to lead the way.
“We’ve got a simple product set, which makes it easy to start with,” said Sulicich. “We’ve got a straightforward origination system. We’ve got really good people in the origination area who are well trained and focused on delivering the right outcomes for brokers and we’re continually focused on adding tech to speed up parts of the mortgage application and funding process.”
“From unconditional approval through to funding, there’s only two small human touches. The rest is all automatic, where we’ve got algorithms and machines passing off pieces of information to the next part of the process before proceeding to settlement.”
“Now, we’re working on getting that process done in the preapproval part of the business as well. We’ve got new tech due at the end of next month and then another bit at the end of the following month, which will just enable our assessing staff to work more quickly and have to ask brokers fewer questions so that we can give an answer more quickly.”
“It’s just focusing on all the points of the origination process that cause pain for brokers and taking that grit out of the system.”
