Speaking to InvestorDaily, BoQ general manager for wealth management Tony Cahill played up the fact that BoQ does not have a financial advice or funds management arm.
“Because we have chosen to not have our own adviser force, there are a number of centres of influence in various areas – nationally and locally – that our model suits,” he said.
Unlike other banks, BoQ does not have an agenda to cross sell any products to the clients of its referral partners, said Mr Cahill.
“Because of that intent not to have a financial planning force, we can work with financial planners and they will know we will do our best on the banking side but we’re not there to try and infiltrate their client base,” he said.
“We want to assist with their client needs but not have another agenda to try to sell them services they already provide to their customers,” said Mr Cahill.
Because 70 per cent of BoQ branches are franchises, there is a strong cultural alignment between their owner-managers and the accounting and planning practices they refer to, he said.
“We’ll do what we do best, we’ll help [planners] out as best we can and their clients, but we won’t be trying to steal them,” said Mr Cahill.
BoQ is also targeting SMSFs on two fronts, said Mr Cahill – as a source of funding, and to grow the bank's loan book.
Given that SMSFs have typically had an allocation of between 25 and 30 per cent to cash, BoQ is looking to the sector for a “range of deposits”, he said.
“There is around $140-odd billion of deposit money [in the SMSF sector] so we’re looking to take our share of that,” said Mr Cahill.
BoQ is also looking to make it easier for SMSFs to interact with it, with improvements in transactional data for accountants and new SMSF software, he added.
While BoQ is taking a conservative approach on the loan book front, it has “quite an explicit strategy” around the types of SMSFs it lends to.
“We’ve got criteria around the minimum size the fund has to be before we’ll deal with them,” Mr Cahill said.
“We won’t lend for small inner-city apartments – less than 50 square metres, for example. And we require that the fund have some liquid assets post the transaction so that it’s not under any immediate financial stress.
“So that book’s going reasonably well. There’s lots of business that I guess we’ve missed out on, but it’s business that I think would come back to haunt us over the next couple of years,” he said.
