The third-party channel has continued to dominate home lending growth for ANZ, but the major has reiterated its focus on proprietary flows.
Australia and New Zealand Group Holdings Limited (ANZ) has revealed that brokers continued to dominate new home lending growth in the last financial year, but the Australian retail bank has reasserted its focus on proprietary lending.
In its financial results for the full year ending September 2025, ANZ’s loan book grew to $341 billion, with $89 billion in new lending. This comprised 181,00 home loan accounts at an average loan size of $586,000.
Excluding Suncorp Bank, brokers originated 68 per cent of new ANZ mortgages over the year ($60.5 billion), the highest proportion on record.
The proportion of home loans written by the proprietary channel was 32 per cent, dipping from 33 per cent last year.
Overall, brokers have now originated 61 per cent of ANZ Bank’s mortgage portfolio, up from 59 per cent in FY24 and 57 per cent in FY23.
However, building on its recently revealed strategy for 2030, the major bank reiterated that it aims to further push its direct channel flows in the future.
In an investor update, the bank stated that it was focusing on improving returns to investors and simplifying the organisation, including by “strengthening proprietary origination”.
This would be done by lifting the number of lenders in branches by 50 per cent over the next five years and investing in and training its mortgage sales force.
Speaking to investors, CEO Nuno Matos said that the bank “was not targeting a ratio of brokers versus property origination at all”.
“We don’t see one versus the other, or one or the other. We see the need to be good in both of them,” he said, adding ANZ needs to do both channels “very well.”
Commenting on the results, Matos said: “Today’s results highlight three things. First, our franchise has a strong competitive position. We have two scale markets, Australia and New Zealand, two market-leading positions, our Institutional and New Zealand businesses, and a well-diversified business benefiting from our strong presence in Asia, the fastest growing economic region in the world.
“Second, we have a significant opportunity to improve our performance in Australia Retail and Business and Private Bank, while extending our leadership in Institutional and New Zealand.
“Third, ANZ 2030 is the right strategy to capture these opportunities.”
However, Matos added that ANZ’s Australian retail and business and private bank had “underperformed”, despite growth in assets and deposits, intense competition, and falling interest rates.
ANZ’s bottom line took a major hit from restructuring and staff lay-off costs. Annual statutory profits tumbled 10 per cent to $5.89 billion, impacted heavily by one-off costs tied to resolving regulatory investigations and actions to “simplify” ANZ’s business.
Annual cash profits plummeted 14 per cent amid high redundancy costs and legal penalties. In September, the bank agreed to pay a penalty of $240 million covering four different investigations linked to misconduct over several years.
ANZ former CEO Shayne Elliott and three senior executives had their end-of-year bonuses docked as a result.
The bank’s former and current leadership team lost a combined $32 million in bonuses, including $13.5 million for Elliott.
In September, the lender announced it would lay off around 3,500 employees over the next 12 months. The redundancies form part of a broader strategy by CEO Matos to simplify the bank and focus on growing mortgage and business lending.
“We continue to make progress on our immediate priorities at pace, including embedding our leadership team and our culture reset, accelerating the integration of Suncorp Bank, delivering the ANZ Plus single-customer front-end, simplifying the bank and reducing duplication, and improving non-financial risk management,” Matos added.
Majors focus on proprietary lending
As broker market share continues to hit new record highs, all four of the major banks are focusing on growing proprietary flows.
Westpac last week revealed a new push to grow proprietary lending to improve returns, while National Australia Bank (NAB) recently reported a 46 per cent increase in proprietary lending over the past two years.
The moves have drawn the ire of the broking industry, prompting the CEO of the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia (MFAA), Anja Pannek, to voice her “disappointment” that channel conflict is once again “rearing its ugly head” in an open letter.
The MFAA CEO identified channel conflict as a major issue, reporting that members have detailed instances of “under-the-counter” branch pricing and loan applications being declined by a broker, but subsequently approved in-branch.
She stated that the practices raise concerns regarding potential lender bias in credit assessment, noting that they “undermine the foundation of our industry – trust”.
[Related: Matos outlines ANZ’s new strategy]
