Westpac has announced an annual profit of $5.45 billion, a massive 138% up on 2020. Shareholders will be paid out 60c per share on the back of the strong results.
The Big Four bank is riding the wave of the Australian housing boom, with mortgage lending up 3% and, despite the ongoing pandemic, home loan delinquencies down 55 basis points compared to last year.
“2021 has been another challenging year, with a focus on continuing to support customers and employees through the pandemic, while implementing our Fix, Simplify and Perform strategic
priorities,” said CEO Peter King.
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“Cash earnings rose, the balance sheet remains strong, and I am pleased with the progress we are making to transform Westpac into a simpler, stronger bank. Credit quality has remained remarkably good with stressed exposures continuing to decline off last year’s peak, while mortgage 90+ day delinquencies were also significantly lower.”
“We grew our Australian mortgage portfolio 3 per cent or $14.7 billion over the year, a significantly better performance than 2020. Owner occupied lending increased 9 per cent. Consistent with increased liquidity in the market, total customer deposits were up 4 per cent, or $24.9 billion.
King accepted that the results were not everything that they could have been, but said that Westpac was moving in the right direction.
“Our underlying results are not where we want them to be, and we recognise we have more to do to become the high-performing company we aspire to be,” he said. “However, we are making progress in changing how the bank is run, including improving our culture and risk management systems, streamlining decision-making processes through lines of business, and streamlining our processes through digitisation.”
That digitisation, according to King, was part of the process that has seen turnaround times fall at Westpac.
“In mortgages, we have further digitised processes and introduced more than 70 policy and process improvements, which contributed to faster approval times,” he said. “Our digital mortgage origination platform peaked at 810 applications per week, and we have started rolling out this platform to mortgage brokers.”
“We also implemented more than 100 policy and process improvements in business lending and increased automated credit decisioning, leading to faster decisions for customers.”
