Deputy MD tells all at 2026 LMG Growth Summit
Macquarie Bank’s broker-only strategy is emerging as a strength in the industry-wide fight against home loan fraud, according to deputy managing director Greg Ward (pictured, right, in discussion with LMG executive chairman Sam White).
In the wake of recent events (i.e. the Big Four banks self reporting over suspected large-scale home loan fraud), Ward noted that much of the current fraud risk has sat in proprietary channels and referral networks – areas where Macquarie is not playing in.
The bank has no mass-market proprietary mortgage channel to worry about and “doesn’t have a referral program at all”, Ward told attendees at the LMG Growth Summit on Wednesday.
"We're going to be doing a lot more... around helping our brokers spot fraud better," added Ward. "It's something that we're all very keen to make sure that our teams don't get victimised by...criminals searching for unsoft underbellies."
Ward, who has been head of banking and financial services since 2013 and deputy managing director since 2011, also boasted that Macquarie’s return on equity in retail banking of 13% comfortably outstrips many of its competitors.
Macquarie’s head of retail banking Ben Parnham recently published this data for the first time in the bank’s history. In publishing it, Macquarie was making the statement that broker commissions are not a drain on capital.
“We’re just making the point that, well, we are a broker business,” said Ward. “We were built for brokers. That’s been the business model since we built this business. It will remain the business model. We’re doing no work on an alternate distribution strategy and we never have because we are built for brokers and hopefully loved by customers, but you know, built for brokers.”
Ward said about 90% of Macquarie’s mortgages are funded by deposits, compared with around 70% for most banks, giving the lender a “large and robust” base designed to keep lending open even in stressed markets.
Speaking of stress, Ward said Macquarie’s decision to exit company and trust lending was made quickly but based on an assessment of capacity, risk and emerging behaviour in the market.
Macquarie made the announcement in correspondence sent to brokers and seen by MPA last October. It came amid concerns that the practice of lending to trusts and companies was being adopted by social media “property spruikers” to skirt serviceability requirements.
Discussing the decision at the LMG Growth Summit, Ward said Macquarie prided itself on being “very agile in terms of the way we make decisions”.
As company and trust application volumes rose, the bank could see its “capacity was starting to get tapped” and that these types of loans were “taking longer to process and to assess.”
On top of that, Ward said Macquarie’s distribution governance and risk teams were observing “some market behaviour that was not the sort of behaviour that we’d want to see in the industry” and that “there was potential risk in that.”
The call was made in mere days after Ward and fellow executives “assessed the various information” and opted to protect turnaround times and service levels for core business rather than chase marginal, higher‑risk volume.
