Major bank offers ‘trail for the life of the customer’

“So, if I've taken a loan today and it runs for three years and I sell my house, and then I take out a new loan, you don't start at the beginning, you pick up where that trail has been. So, you get the trail for the life of the customer, which is very different from a trail for the life of the loan.”

According to Mr Kane, getting the policies and trail for the new products right was “very important” to the bank.

He explained: “The retail bank has always had 10-year interest loan investment lending. For whatever reason we had a separate policy for the broker business. Now we're aligning our credit policies so that they’re exactly the same. If a customer comes through the broker channel, the credit policies for that particular customer are exactly the same as if they came through our bank.

“Part of that is to lead against channel conflict, and part of that is to make sure that the customer[s]... get exactly the same experience, whether they are introduced by a broker or whether they come directly through a proprietary channel. It’s very important.”

Third-party channel ‘far greater than 53 per cent’

According to the bank, the new Broking for Life campaign, along with the new NAB product suite, is part of the bank’s campaign to take advantage of the growing broker channel.

Mr Kane said: “Why would [we] do this? The reality is, we know that over half of Australians are now using brokers. We actually think third-party introduction, whether that be by brokers or referrers or whoever it happens to be, is far greater than the 53 per cent that we've seen quite a bit in the market. It's probably up in the mid 60s, but the broker channel specifically is probably somewhere between 53 and 56 per cent today. We see it growing. We don't see it shrinking. We see the proposition that they bring to the customer…

“[We] do a business case for everything, [but] we didn't do this on the basis of that's what it's about. We did it on the basis that customers are going to brokers, they're going to continue to go to brokers in ever-increasing amounts. If we don't provide the right service and the right opportunity for those customers to deal with us through the broker, then... it's not so much how much more we will get; it's how much less we will get.

“It's as much a defensive strategy as it is an acquisition strategy. It's just the right thing to do. If we truly believe in the broker channel, and we do, then we had to show that, not just talk about it.”

[Related: NAB overhauls lending offer for mortgage brokers]