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Jessica Darnbrough
Six months after it announced a return to third party distribution, the Bank of Queensland has launched a trial period in Western Australia.
Speaking to ABC’s Inside Business on the weekend, the bank’s new chief executive officer Stuart Grimshaw said: “we are trialling our products and services through Western Australia brokers to see how we go. Our processes are not that robust at the moment and we know that if we are to expand into other markets, we will need to improve a number of our processes first.”
While Bank of Queensland’s planned third party return is nothing new, with the lender first outlining its third party strategy back in March, the bank has remained quiet on the topic until now.
Last month, several aggregation heads told The Adviser that the Bank of Queensland was still completing its due diligence and had not finalised its broker program.
A spokesperson for the bank yesterday confirmed this was the case and said the bank would look to fully engage the channel in March next year.
"We are currently having selective discussions with certain broker groups, but we won't be rolling out our products to the wider channel until March 2013," the spokesperson said.
The Bank of Queensland has also admitted it made a mistake by leaving the broker channel in 2004.
Mr Grimshaw said Bank of Queensland’s decision to cut all ties with mortgage brokers back in 2004 limited the lender’s “ability to compete”.
“The growth of the broker channel was underestimated by a lot of people,” he told the ABC.
“We chose to stay where we were, which was actually a logical decision at the time. What we saw following our decision to leave the channel was an explosion in the usage of brokers. Today, brokers account for more than 40 per cent of all mortgages written.”
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