NAB Broker's John Flavell has defended the separate positioning of Homeside products and the bank's branch-based offerings.

Connective principal Mark Haron has said the bank is ‘lagging’ competitors with the disparity between Homeside and NAB Red Star products. However, Flavell argued Homeside allowed brokers to deliver an exclusive proposition to consumers.

“If I’d not had the Homeside brands, I wouldn’t have been able to make our price for risk products available to the market, and those are exclusively available through brokers. The feedback I get from brokers is that that’s the right approach,” Flavell told Australian BrokerNews.

Flavell said the “subtle differences” between the bank’s Red Star and Homeside products related largely to deals that made up only “1% of the market”. “Where there exist those subtle differences from a policy perspective, they are on things like self-managed superannuation, and there we’re able to provide some solutions to brokers on the NAB platform and fulfil it through using a loan writing specialist. I don’t have any desire to make that available through Homeside,” he explained.

“Differences in policy in the past were probably driven when you got to the mortgage insurance space. Where we are at the moment is we’re actually applying the NAB policy on that to all the loans in Homeside.”

Homeside is seen by NAB as a significant source of growth. Currently, there are around seven Homeside deals for every one being written through its loan writing solutions program.

“People tend to use it as a bit of a locum service. The reason people use the NAB channel is they want to have a person manage the process instead of the system, and they want to outsource part of the fulfilment to specialists. It’s a good value proposition for brokers who want to use it.”