A lender head has urged banks to put brokers in closer contact with credit decision makers in order to increase productivity.
Speaking to the Connective conference on the Gold Coast. National Mortgage Company executive chair Steven Dover has commented that the broking industry's drive toward productivity can be aided by giving brokers more access to underwriting authorities.
"It's all good to sit back and say you should be more productive and that people should do this or that in their business, but really what we've got to do is get back to the old style of banking," he said.
"That's by having decision makers able to make the decisions for the loans that get done. I think that if we were to support brokers more with that type of attnetion, we're going to get a lot more productivity from brokers as well," Dover said.
Dover commented that NMC has put in place systems to give brokers better access to its credit team in order to improve processing efficiencies.
"We've actually put a lot of work and effort into our scenario hotline, and that's been taken up very favourably. It's not just, 'Come in and give us a call and we'll tell you whether we can do the deal'. We actually have reference numbers, we have benchmarks, and those reference numbers actually allow you to submit a deal, and when you get bacl to us we actually know if that's been approved in principle," he said.
Dover said this access would ultimately allow brokers to write more loans, increasing productivity.
"If I know anything from being a broker, it's that the most productive thing we can do is get more loans written and to have the support of credit people and a delegated lending authority that have actually looked at that scenario and said it's a deal, and don't change the parameters by the time it comes back. I think that's probably one of the best things we've done from our side to be more productive," he said.