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By: Jessica Darnbrough
NAB is set to overhaul the way it interacts with its brokers in a bid to streamline the mortgage process and build market share.
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According to an article in The Australian Financial Review, NAB will change its current procedures so that brokers will have more access to NAB staff and be able to escalate disputes more easily.
Furthermore, the major hopes to simplify the evidence brokers need to verify a client’s income.
The changes are aimed at placating complaints from brokers that NAB remains too difficult to do business with, despite having the cheapest standard variable rate of all the majors.
The major was recently ranked last in The Adviser’s Third Party Banking Report – Major Lenders, with many brokers commenting that NAB’s turnaround times were sluggish and needed significant improvement.
A broker told The Adviser that even with modern technology, turnaround times were getting worse.
“It takes two days to acknowledge receipt of an application before it enters an assessors tray and then two to three days for the assessor to "pick it up" and this is considered acceptable by lenders,” he said.
The executive general manager of NAB Partnerships, Matt Lawler said Westpac’s decision to raise its standard variable rate 20 basis points above the RBA’s 0.25 per cent increase had caught the major off guard.
“Brokers can turn business to you very quickly, which is good in some ways but it catches you unaware in terms of how many people you have to process and underwrite and do credit checks on. We had no idea that Westpac was going to make that decision and we were going to be the beneficiary in terms of large volumes. That had us in the position where our turnaround times blew out,” he said.
“Today, we are getting more volume than we did in January or February. But because we’ve had a chance to put on more people, to train them, change our policies and processes, we’re actually in a much better position to cope with that volume than we were previously.”
