National Australia Bank (NAB) plans to build partnerships across the mortgage broking, financial planning and mortgage management industries with the creation of a new division called NAB Partnerships.
"NAB Partnerships provides us with a great platform to build relationships with brokers, mortgage managers and financial planners by providing them with a comprehensive range of services that help them grow their businesses," NAB Partnerships executive general manager Matt Lawler said.
This comes on the back of the announcement that NAB had completed the $385 million acquisition of Challenger Mortgage Management.
The business will now be known as Advantedge and will sit with NAB Broker in the NAB Partnerships division.
Advantedge chief executive Drew Hall said there would be no changes to management as a result of the acquisition, but foreshadowed some new product offerings.
"We've got the power of a very big balance sheet now that will help with new products," Hall said.
He said that he expected Advantedge would announce new products in the next few weeks.
The acquisition included Challenger's PLAN, Choice and FAST mortgage aggregator businesses and Challenger's multi-branded mortgage origination business.
It also included a portfolio of approximately $4.5 billion in residential mortgages and an interest of approximately 17.5 per cent in Homeloans Ltd.
"The creation of NAB Partnerships and the acquisition of Advantedge marks the completion of an important milestone for NAB Personal Banking," Lawler said.
NAB announced on 18 August 2009 that it had reached an agreement to purchase Challenger Mortgage Management.
