Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has made it a priority to improve the effectiveness of its mortgage broker distribution channel, where only a fraction of its accredited brokers are currently selling its loans.In a strategy update yesterday the bank revealed that it had 10,000 accredited brokers on its books but only 1500 of them were active over the past 12 months.Bendigo and Adelaide partner connection executive Bruce Speirs said this was a challenge the bank was working to fix.Later this year the bank will launch a new mortgage origination platform, LendFast, that will increase the bank's capacity to deal with third party originators, reduce approval and processing times and lower costs.Speirs said it would also give brokers visibility, allowing them to track the progress of a mortgage application through the bank's system and keep their clients up to date.Bendigo has struggled to keep pace with system growth in mortgages. In the 12 months to December its housing finance portfolio grew by three per cent, compared with the market average of 7.2 per cent.The bank's retail distribution channel has growth of 5.8 per cent. It was the third party channel that let it down.Things have picked up this year, with growth of 3.5 per cent in the mortgage book in the March quarter, compared with 1.8 per cent in the December quarter and zero in the September quarter.The bank's chief financial officer, Richard Fennell, said: "We have slowed the third party contraction and got it back into a holding pattern."Chief executive Mike Hirst said Bendigo and Adelaide was "very much a value player" and would not price aggressively to win business."We will not write unprofitable business," Hirst said."We are consistent with our partners and that has value for them."The bank joined in the round of out-of-cycle interest rate increase last year, when it put rates up in November. However, it raised its standard variable rate for owner-occupiers by only 12 basis points, while most other lenders were raising rates by 18 bps to 20 bps.Hirst said some of the weakness in mortgage lending could be put down to the work the bank was doing to achieve advanced accreditation with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority - an important step that will give the bank more scope in calculating the risk weightings of its assets for capital adequacy purposes.Hirst said: "It has been a distraction. We have to build new systems. We have to re-rate our files. That has taken people off the street."