Bank rebrand greenlighted ahead of new market launch

Goldfields Money Limited has announced that the change of its brand to BNK Banking Corporation has been approved by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), two weeks after 96 per cent of its shareholders voted in support of the move.

The bank will begin trading on the ASX under the new brand from Wednesday, 20 March, but will continue operating its banking business under the Goldfields banner until it launches its revamped digital platform later this year.

The move follows its merger with Finsure Group in September 2018. However, the group has noted that Finsure’s aggregation business and its wholesale lending business (Better Choice Home Loans) will continue to operate under their own brands.

Following the announcement of ASIC’s approval, Goldfields managing director Simon Lyons said: “The name change was driven by our desire to implement a digital strategy to make banking easier and simpler for our customers and to develop a national offering.

“We believe that our new name and branding better reflects our core values of simplicity, honesty and transparency.”

When asked what the digital strategy would entail, Mr Lyons told Mortgage Business that it would provide the bank with “more capability around the statutory processing of deposit accounts”.

He continued: “The new brand, BNK Bank, is going to be launched later this year, and that will be a further updated version of our digital platform, which will have online banking account opening for normal deposit accounts, loan accounts, etc.

“That's the piece that we’re finalising now.”

Mr Lyons said that since the Goldfields’ merger with Finsure, the bank has collected market data from its third-party network to better inform the design of its own retail banking products.

“That provides us with an enormous amount of intelligence around what brokers want, what’s selling in the markets, and who’s buying what sort of products,” he stated.

The managing director added that the data would help position the banking business to “write more on-balance sheet loans”, which, according to the group’s half-year results for the 2019 financial year, total $176 million, compared to $37.8 billion in off-balance sheet loans.

Mr Lyons added that the revamped digital platform would be tailored for mortgage brokers.

“Mortgage broking and mortgage aggregation has always been a big part of our strategy,” he said.

“We’ve always gone to the market through brokers and, in fact, this bank brand has really been built for brokers as well.”

[Related: Bank-aggregator loan book hits $36.9 billion]