ING Direct has brought together its direct and third party business units under the leadership of Mark Woolnough in the newly created role head of distribution.  Woolnough, who joined ING in 2000 as a relationship manager, had headed up the former direct mortgages team before taking on leadership of ING's third party distribution, which currently brings in 90 per cent of the bank's home loan business. "By bringing together these two areas of our business we are aiming to create a 'centre of excellence' for mortgages, ensuring all our customers get the same consistent and great experience of our brand," Woolnough said. Leaving aside the marketing spin, this is at its core a management restructure ahead of a review and consolidation of the mortgage business, fitting it within ING Direct's broader retail business. In this new role, Woolnough reports to Melanie Evans, ING's head of retail. This move at the top is therefore intended as just a first step towards introducing efficiencies across an important part of ING's retail operations - although the broker distribution model alone has been ING's "bread and butter" retail business for some time. The current processes have notable differences in the way documentation is handled either in-house or by the third party brokers, for instance. The two areas also currently report differently, creating further silo effects. The process to be undertaken by Woolnough, therefore, will inevitably involve taking the best practices from all mortgage origination teams to create a common standard. An ING Direct spokesperson said the aim was to remove the current differences in work practices, allowing teams to move between in-house and broker teams, depending on the respective workloads in each business line. ING Direct remains Australia's fifth largest home lender, just ahead of Suncorp, according to the latest APRA statistics. As at April 2017, ING Direct had almost A$42 billion in outstanding home loans, split approximately 77 per cent to owner-occupiers to 23 per cent investors.