Making news this week, Yellow Brick Road (YBR) underwent a major corporate reshuffle, Heritage Bank announced a new high-profile broker head and the
MFAA has branded a report in the Australian Financial Review a “serious allegation”.
Mark Bouris announced a major restructure of the Yellow Brick Road group as it strives to hit a $100 billion loan book by 2020. The restructure aims to streamline the group by better aligning the leadership structure to reflect the company’s core business units – lending and wealth management – rather than having leadership structure shaped by two separate business entities: Vow Financial and YBR.
As a result, Tim Brown, former CEO of Vow has been appointed to the newly created CEO – Lending and Matt Lawler, former CEO of YBR has been appointed to the newly created CEO – Wealth Management.
Heritage Bank also announced a corporate restructure, introducing a newly created broker head role in a bid to drive stronger growth through the broker channel.
Michael Trencher has been appointed to the new position of head of intermediaries. He has more than 15 years of experience in strategic leadership of national distribution teams. Most recently he was the national manager partnerships of the
NAB Broker business. Prior to that, he held senior roles with
ANZ and
Mortgage Choice.
Finally, the
MFAA made headlines this week with the chief executive of the association branding a report in the AFR – which questions the ethics of mortgage brokers and likened some to a Ponzi scheme – as a “serious allegation”.
“The practices of brokers are well documented and require the provision of supporting upfront documents such as payslips, group certificates, tax returns and identification check as part of the upfront application. Lying has no place in this industry and we take swift action if members are acting unethically. It should also be noted that brokers who act outside of the law represent an incredibly small portion of the industry,” Hayden said.
“We call on the AFR or the research firm provides the names of these mortgage brokers, as the MFAA has a strict code of practice and ethics attached to its membership. If these are MFAA members we would initiate a full investigation and work in partnership with the industry regulator, ASIC,” Hayden said.
