MyState Bank and Auswide Bank are adopting a single digital platform with the help of NextGen, while maintaining their separate brand identities in Australia’s thriving M&A landscape.
The merged MyState-Auswide Bank will now use a single digital-first system — NextGen's ApplyOnline platform — to handle all its loan applications and approvals across both broker and direct channels. Both NextGen and MyState said this will help improve broker workflows.
"This is a platform built for growth," said Brett Morgan, chief executive officer of MyState Limited. "It will allow us to serve more brokers and customers, more efficiently, while staying true to the values that define us: local relationships, personal service and trust.
"Our success is intrinsically tied to our broker partners, and NextGen's platform will enable us to deliver faster decisioning, seamless experiences and the level of service brokers expect," he continued. "Brokers are at the heart of how we grow, particularly across the eastern seaboard where we don’t have a branch presence. Our goal is simple — to make it faster and easier for brokers to do business with us, and to deliver a better, more consistent experience for customers.”
Mike Ponsonby, head of lender partnerships at NextGen, added to Australian Broker: "We're really excited about the transformation, because it allows brands to continue to exist in their own regional markets, but is also drives significant savings and benefits for productivity in their origination, which is the biggest driver of their cost base.
"Delivering value into the broker and direct-to-consumer [channels] via first-party is a pretty big coup," he continued. "There's a lot of mergers that are happening at the moment. A lot of organizations are saying, 'how do we actually do a successful merger that still allows our brands and our customers to still experience our brands?' But at the same time, 'how do we get efficiency and cost, benefits and productivity in our back office and how do we actually get more automation and innovation in that space?' So the key thing that we are doing is designing a capability where we can execute a multi-brand merger but still allow brands to exist in the marketplace whilst actually transforming the back office, which is the biggest challenge for banks is actually getting origination efficiency. That's where all of the costs are in their businesses. The business might, say, have 100 people in its back office, but they only know their own system and they can't actually work across brands. This technology allows the back office staff, for instance, in this merger, to actually work across brands and across different products."
In the case of MyState-Auswide, the new platform allows the two banks to maintain separate brands for customers while combining their back-end operations, so staff no longer need to manage two different systems. The system automates workflows with pre-filled forms and application programming interfaces (APIs) that link to other systems, speeding up loan processing and reducing manual work. According to Ponsonby, the platform aims to improve accuracy, enable same-day approvals, boost staff productivity and support faster growth while enhancing service for brokers.
"The benefits to brokers are that they'll get efficiencies in response times, how quick decisions come back, while [lenders] increase the size of their workforce across multiple brands," he said. "Critically, because MyState views applications through the same interface as brokers, data verified in ApplyOnline gives brokers confidence in credit decisioning outcomes."
The new platform is expected to go live in October or November of 2026, Ponsonby said.
In February, Tasmanian-based MyState merged with Queensland-based Auswide Bank. The merged MyState Limited — which now includes the MyState Bank, Selfco, TPT Wealth and now Auswide Bank brands — now serves 275,000 customers with $12.9 billion in home loans and $10.1 billion in deposits.
Since the merger, the newly-formed entity has been actively working to grow its broker channel. In July, MyState hired Mark Woolnough as group head of broker, a position that puts him at the helm of the third-party distribution teams at both MyState and Auswide. Post merger, the total loan book grew 7.5% on an annualized basis.
