Delivering an experience second to none

I am absolutely passionate about helping people grow and succeed.
In this role, I get to develop my team, build the business of our brokers and most importantly deliver the great Australian dream to our customers.

And while that may sound a little clichéd, rest assured I am not a cardboard corporate cut-out. Some of you may not know that as well as my ANZ history, I have a career that spans AFL coaching with Subiaco in WA, running my country pub and coaching junior sport – the common element is dealing with people. 

ANZ has been increasing its market share over the past 12 months, particularly in NSW. What do you see as the key drivers behind this?

Recently, we expanded our NSW sales force with an additional 15 BDMs on the ground, including multi-lingual specialists. By doing so, the broker receives a stronger relationship and enjoys even greater certainty from ANZ and more focused support.

We also understand there is a lot more to customer experience than simply approving and settling a loan. The challenge for us is to continue to keep working hard with brokers to ensure the full end-to-end finance experience is a smooth and easy process for brokers and for customers. An example of this is our decision to move to a six-day assessment, allowing many customers to get pre-approval on a Saturday morning and head out for a day of auctions, rather than waiting until Monday.

The broking industry is growing and maturing rapidly – how do you see the next few years progressing? Where is the biggest opportunity for brokers in this current market?

Brokers have a unique opportunity to satisfy customers’ needs, as in reality they match the customer with the most appropriate lender. I believe there is opportunity for brokers to hold even more market share on this basis. I’d like to encourage brokers to listen to the challenges of the marketplace and keep the customer at the centre of every decision.

As the market continues to change and evolve, if brokers keep this at the essence of what they do, they will succeed. We are always looking for ways to help brokers look good in front of customers, and I ask brokers to speak out if they ever feel we are not aligned.

The two biggest opportunities I see for brokers are firstly, diversifying into the commercial finance of their clients. Secondly, in the customer-centric world brokers operate, considering the customer’s holistic financial needs, not just the home loan. Matching this with a bank’s full end-to-end service offering is an unbeatable model.

What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for brokers?

Reducing attrition is something I see as an increasing trend. It’s important not to overlook servicing your existing client base!

Additionally, it’s important for brokers to consider consistency, certainty and to work to ensure prospective customers ‘fit’ with the financier being recommended. I ask my team to listen to what customers are telling us, and use it to shape our actions and our future business decisions.

Channel conflict can often be a problem – what is your approach?

We believe our branch network is an absolute strength in complementing our customer and broker value proposition. We encourage all of our brokers to forge working relationships with their nearby branches. When all parties work together, we really do exceed customer needs.

How are you investing in brokers?

Alongside our technological enhancements, we are increasingly investing in the training of our brokers. In April, we piloted a “Building Credit Knowledge” webinar on sole traders and partnerships to a limited number of WA brokers. The webinar was accredited with the MFAA for one CPD point and received some fantastic broker feedback.

We are now broadening the scope to all brokers and topics will also be expanded to further educate and support our brokers. 

As well as direct ANZ to broker training, we are increasing our sponsorship of aggregators to further fund broker development and training regimes.

ANZ has always been known for the strength of its BDM team – why do you think this is and what makes your team stand out?

We understand the relationships between our BDMs and brokers are imperative in ensuring the long-term goals of customers are met. This is why all of our team undergo ongoing training designed to further develop their communication, listening and presentation skills also with a focus on change management.

We are encouraging our BDMs to complete a diploma of finance and mortgage broking management recognised by the MFAA, with ongoing support through relationship coaching and product knowledge training.

Is ANZ planning on rolling out any new product or service offerings (in the remainder of this year) that it would like to let brokers know about?

We want all ANZ customers to receive a first-class service. This comes alive in the form of our loan change requests, the scope of which will be expanded even further later this year; our toolkit functionality, which will be enhanced progressively over the coming months; and an automated pricing tool by the end of this year.

The next highlight for us is our online document submission, which we are currently piloting and will be implementing in July. Brokers will be able to upload files up to 50MB with one click. The system checks files for viruses, conducts redaction of tax file numbers and also gives a higher image quality. 