The bank is looking to hold someone accountable, with a leadership shakeup looking likely, sources say
ANZ is reportedly ready to hold someone accountable for the disastrous performance of its mortgage business, with sources saying retail head Mark Hand is barely hanging onto his job.
Sources told The Australian that ANZ was close to announcing changes to its executive leadership team – an announcement that will likely come sometime this week.
ANZ has seen mortgage market share snapped up by rivals Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank, mainly due to ANZ’s slow processing times.
At last year’s annual meeting, ANZ chairman Paul O’Sullivan said the board was frustrated by the mortgage division’s performance. The unit had not been prepared to respond to a sudden spike in demand, and bled market share as a result of that lack of preparation.
“Naturally, this has been a major focus for the board and management, and we are confident that the systemic actions being undertaken by management will address these issues, including increased investment in automation and process improvement,” O’Sullivan said. “As a result, we expect our Australian home-loan portfolio to return to growth in this half and for ANZ’s growth to be in line with system growth sometime in the second half of this financial year.”
ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott said late last year that the front end was working well, The Australian reported.
“In terms of our branch network, we don’t have a problem at all in terms of turnaround times,” Elliott said. “People going into the branch get a turnaround really quickly and very competitively. [The problem] has been in the broker space.”
Elliott said that following the financial services royal commission, ANZ decided to manually assess all broker applications. That made it hard to prepare for higher demand – especially when COVID-19 hit and it became more difficult to train new people in the office environment, The Australian reported.
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Hand acknowledged to investors that he hadn’t foreseen the mortgage boom.
“So in terms of our preparedness for that, we weren’t ready,” he said.
In the months since, ANZ’s mortgage business has improved. It now has the ability to write home loans more than double the level of 18 months ago, and is in the process of doubling that again, The Australian reported.
“But that takes time – to automate processes you need to change systems, you need to retrain staff, and you need to put new staff on,” Hand said. “So we have redeployed a lot of staff from other parts of the bank to help with this, but the technology solutions, the automation solutions that we need to put in place just simply take time.”
