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More than $365 million in loans were settled through the Bendigo lending platform during its pilot phase (2H24), according to the non-major’s full-year results.
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has released its financial results for the financial year ended 30 June, its first results reporting since the group moved away from its Adelaide Bank brand and opened up Bendigo Bank to the broker channel.
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While releasing its full results on Monday (26 August), the lender revealed that its loan book grew by 2.6 per cent to $80.8 billion over the year.
This growth was driven by increases in the ASX-listed lender’s loan balances for residential, business, and agribusiness, with resi up 3.1 per cent ($60.4 billion), business up 1.2 per cent ($10.4 billion), and agribusiness up 7.4 per cent ($6.8 billion).
The non-major attributed the gains in agribusiness to opportunities in Queensland and Western Australia and business to its “strategic advantages” in micro and SME business.
However, Bendigo reported decreases to its loan balance for consumer and margin loans, with consumer down 9.3 per cent ($1.5 billion) and margin down 8.8 per cent ($1.7 billion).
The lender also provided further insight regarding the shift over from the Adelaide Bank brand and uptake of the Bendigo lending platform among the broker channel since its pilot launch in November 2023.
The lender flagged a 19 per cent increase in residential lending settlements in 2H24, with digital mortgage settlements representing 19.3 per cent of this total.
Total broker residential settlements were also up 15 per cent on the prior half, including settlements through the Bendigo lending platform.
Launched in November 2023, the Bendigo lending platform has been one of the key initiatives in Bendigo’s transformation to a fully digital bank, with the broker channel prioritised.
During an investor call, long-serving Bendigo CEO and managing director Marnie Baker (who is set to depart from the lender at the end of August) said the bank was happy with the platform’s performance so far.
“We now have onboarded all of our brokers and the aggregators, so we are now fully onboarded,” Baker said.
"We’ve been really pleased with the response from the broker network, but also we’re really pleased with how that platform is performing now that we have everyone on board from the broker perspective.
“We’re now actually putting our mind to how we actually now onboard our retail network, so we’ll see the full volume starting to actually go through.”
Andrew Morgan, Bendigo, chief financial officer, told investors the bank was confident they had a significant proportion of the broker population onboarded.
“We’re now at the point where we’re satisfied [that] we’ve got the full population in there. I think it’s fair to say we don’t sit here and think about proportions of the book that we’d like to see through various channels,” Morgan said.
“What we have been really determined to do, though, is to support this channel. It’s 70 per cent of Australians that choose the broker intermediate channel.
“What our new lending platform has done is made that channel as efficient as we can possibly make it, and we’re already starting to see that play out in a reduced cost of manufacture for those loans. And that’s part of the reason why we’ve been very comfortable to start deploying capital into that channel, and it’s the reason why we’ve been able to grow above system, and why we’re confident of being able to grow above system in FY25.”
Baker said one of the reasons the non-major put the lending platform out to its broker network first was so it would be able to retire the Adelaide Bank system (which was only available through the broker channel).
“Because the product that we were offering through Adelaide Bank really was just an individual product, and it didn’t allow us to actually deepen any relationships there,” she said.
“And so the other thing that we’re focusing on now that it’s actually on the Bendigo Bank lending platform, is, how do we actually create a much deeper relationship with those customers?”
[Related: Bankwest announces major transformation, focus on brokers]
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