National Australia Bank (NAB) has plans to tap into the mortgage broking advice market following the acquisition of Challenger's mortgage management business.
"We're quite excited about the future of the industry in Australia, so it's quite a young industry that's grown up over the last seven to 10 years," NAB Broker executive general manager Matt Lawler told InvestorDaily.
"We believe that now Australians are actually choosing to get advice from a mortgage broker more often. We think that's now an embedded part of the financial services landscape - it's got a bright future and we'd like to be part of that.
"As mortgage brokers start to deal in more issues than just mortgages and they start to talk to their clients about other products and services, we're in a good position to support them."
The acquisition of Challenger's mortgage management businesses brought significant capability in white label mortgages, Lawler said.
"That is a capability that NAB and MLC currently don't have, so that's a capability that we think is quite valuable in the future as well."
NAB currently had no other acquisition plans in the pipeline in the mortgage broking space, Lawler said.
"It does give us some options for the future, but there are no plans for some future acquisitions," he said.
"This is quite a sizeable acquisition and we're going to have our hands full doing this one, let alone looking at others."
Regulation of the mortgage broking market was going to be the next big change in the industry, Lawler said.
"It's probably going to be quite similar to the financial planning industry when it first went through regulation through the Financial Services Reform Act," he said.
Yesterday the firm announced the acquistion of Challenger's mortgage business for $385 million.
