Bendigo Bank letting go of Adelaide Bank brand

One of Australia’s largest non-major banks, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, has announced that the Adelaide Bank brand is being withdrawn with no new business to be written on its origination and servicing platform from the end of June.

While it has been widely known in the banking industry that this was occurring, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank executives revealed more about the bank’s plans at its recent 2024 Investor Day presentation, including the fact that brokers will write loans with Bendigo Bank not Adelaide Bank by the end of Q1 2025.

Adelaide Bank is the broker-facing side of the bank, featuring an extensive network of brokers, as well as white-label brokers and mortgage partners, while Bendigo Bank is the more well-known public brand of the customer bank.

Other individual brands the bank owns include digital loan offering BEN Express, which is powered by Tiimely, digital bank Up, Qantas Money Home Loans, Tiimely Home and NRMA Home Loans.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank chief transformation officer Ryan Brosnahan (pictured above left) said the bank’s transformation plans aimed to reduce complexity, while “modernising and digitising key processes and technology to become a more adaptable and responsive bank that enables our customers to interact with us how and when they want”.

“In 2020, we were running eight different core banking systems,” Brosnahan said. “Every time we had to make a product change or a compliance change, a policy update, we had to make it multiple times over.”

The bank now had strong momentum, said Brosnahan, and had progressed significantly in reducing the complexity, which included bringing Delphi Bank (completed FY23);  Alliance Bank (completed FY24), Rural Bank (started FY24) and Adelaide Bank (started FY 24) under the Bendigo Bank system.

Brosnahan said it had transitioned Delphi and Alliance Bank customers onto Bendigo’s core platform.

“The alliance integration alone allowed us to retire four core banking systems, more than 200 products and 30 technology applications,” he said. “We are now down to three core banking systems and we are working on our final two migrations, Rural Bank and Adelaide Bank.”

Brosnahan said the plan had been to complete the work this calendar year but priorities in cybersecurity and strengthening fraud controls were delivered.

“This means we’ll complete the Rural Bank migration this year and have already started the rundown of the Adelaide Bank book.

“We’ll be writing all new business with brokers on Bendigo products and systems by the end of Q1 25 and we’ll complete the full migration of Adelaide Bank by the end of next year.”

Migrating to Bendigo Bank meant Adelaide Bank customers would gain access to Australia’s most trusted bank, including a greater range of products and services, “enabling us to deepen our relationships with these customers”, Brosnahan said.

No new business would be written on the Adelaide Bank platform from the end of June 2024.

Bendigo’s new lending platform

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank CEO Marnie Baker (pictured above centre) said the bank’s new lending platform would deliver a “one way, same way process for residential lending across the bank while deepening our relationships with our broker source customers”.

“The platform is in market today and is delivering equal to industry-best turnaround times,” Baker said.

Brosnahan said the platform had been built with more than 180 reusable APIs, helping to automate processes and speed up time to decision.

A PowerPoint presentation provided on the day said the new lending platform would make life easier for the bank’s customers, staff and partners, including brokers. It meant Bendigo Bank-branded products could be offered to the broker market.

Median time to conditional approval would improve from five days to six minutes, with time to unconditional approval 22% faster and it would boost the number of applications per day by 60%.

^{Source: Investor Day presentation, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, May 23}

The bank’s chief financial officer, Andrew Morgan (pictured above right), said the lending platform was in flight.

“We finished most of the build for our broker partners and we’ll move to complete the balance of the program into the next year,” Morgan said. “The introduction of our new lending platform for brokers will bring both revenue and cost benefits.”

“We expect to deepen our relationships with broker-introduced customers who today have 1.7 products with this. We believe we lift this to two to three over time and with a largely automated assessment process, we expect to see meaningful reductions in the cost of manufacturing mortgages in the next few years.”

Morgan said this would provide Bendigo and Adelaide Bank with significant scale benefits, building on the growth of broker-introduced lending.

Bank’s transformation plans

Baker said the Investor Day presentation was aimed at sharing the bank’s progress and strategy to become Australia’s bank of choice.

This included continued investment in core technology to transform the bank’s business and agribusiness divisions into one, boost productivity, and also leverage digital capabilities across Up, digital deposits and the new lending platform.

Also in attendance at the Investor Day alongside Morgan, Brosnahan and Baker were Richard Fennell (CCO consumer), Bruce Speirs (COO),  Adam Rowse (CCO business and agri), Louise Tebutt (chief people officer) and Taso Corolis (chief risk officer), pictured below.

“Bendigo Bank is the only credible challenger to the major banks,” Baker said. “There is no-one else that has the strength, capability and differentiation that Bendigo has.”

“Our balance sheet has never been stronger. Our capital levels are well in excess of the majors on a standardised basis. Our funding levels as a measure of our household deposits are market leading and we continue to deliver some of the lowest credit losses in the industry through the cycle.”

Baker said for the last five years Bendigo and Adelaide Bank had been laying the foundations for its next phase of development.

“We’ve simplified our bank, our brands, systems and processes. We’ve developed and sourced the expertise and capability required and we’ve built the infrastructure.”

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