Adelaide Bank's rebrand won't be 'dancing girls and elephancts', but it will promote broker use, Damian Percy has said.

The bank launched a “new look and feel” website on Saturday and Percy, the bank’s general manager of third party lending, has told Australian BrokerNews the site will promote Adelaide Bank as a distinct brand from its Bendigo Bank retail arm, and one that is exclusively the domain of intermediaries.

“The new website is the first step in pushing the brand out there with the very clear advocacy for advice-based banking. The call to action throughout the website is ‘Adelaide Bank is great, mortgages are great, let’s all buy houses. Would you like one? Speak to your broker’,” Percy said.

Percy explained that the merger between Bendigo and Adelaide Bank had seen Bendigo take on retail duties and Adelaide become the “exclusive domain of our intermediary cash and lending business”. He said this had distinction had previously not been made overt through the company’s branding, but that the rebranding launch would see Adelaide “refreshing the brand”.

“We’re not going out there and having roadshows and dancing girls and elephants. It’s more, ‘Let’s rebuild the website and speak to clients about the benefits of mortgage broking’,” he said.
The current launch of the rebrand sees consumers urged to speak to a mortgage broker generally. However, Percy said the bank could begin recommending specific brokers for specific client needs.

“It’s a staged approach. We didn’t want to come out with the end state right away. The plan is to progressively get to the point where we either push them to things like the MFAA to put them in contact with a local broker, or to get to the point where we may well recommend an individual or group of brokers we deal with that we know are at the right place and have the right experience,” Percy said.

The bank is also building a new portal for its broker partners, and is close to completing an upgrade to its online banking system for consumers. Percy said the rebranding efforts will set the bank apart as a brand exclusively for the use of third-party intermediaries, though he conceded there was a risk involved in this position.

“We are still working on the assumption that when the client goes to the broker, they will get the genuine broking experience. That means there’s no obligation for that broker to recommend an Adelaide Bank product. That’s the risk you have to take to support the channel,” he said.