Consistency the key: ASB chief executive

ASB share of the mortgage adviser market has stayed remarkably flat recently compared to other big banks.

ASB chief executive Vittoria Shortt told TMM that that over the last eight quarters mortgage advisers have accounted for between 55% and 60% of home loans originated.

She's happy with the third party origination being in this band. "I like consistency if at all possible.’

“The broker groups, they're important to us and they always will be and consistency is good.”

Interestingly following the Reserve Bank's first cut to the OCR in four years this week, ASB lowered all its home loan rates while other banks such as ANZ and BNZ only passed on the OCR cut through their floating rates.

We asked Shortt if this was ASB getting back into the lending market and chasing market share after nearly no lending in in the last part of 2023 she said; “No”.

“We don't chase market share for market share's sake.”

“I think you've got to take a long-term approach. And I think, I worry that if you're chasing market share that you do silly things.

“That would be my worry. It's back to the point I just made about being consistent. I think it's really important that you consistently show up in market, that you are competitive, that you've got a good service proposition, that your credit settings are appropriate. That consistency, in my mind, is really important.”

“And don't get me wrong, we are one of the top lenders in the country and we want to continue to be that. But what I don't want to do is be up and down and inconsistent. And unfortunately, I think sometimes that can be an outcome, if you're chasing share.”

She acknowledges ASB “took a different view of pricing and we lost a lot of share as a result of that. So we still stick to our pricing thinking and methodologies and all the rest of it, and now we're seeing a shift.

‘So our basic philosophy hasn't changed though, but some of our input costs have.