Bank of China Australia Limited has embarked on an end-of-year hiring blitz as its business continues to generate record loan volumes and deposit inflows.
In the past month the bank has posted advertisements for more than 20 new positions across its Australian operations including branch tellers and relationship managers in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
BoCAL is also looking to recruit new credit, risk and AML compliance specialists to join its head office in Sydney.
In job advertisements posted on seek.com.au, BoCAL is encouraging existing and former employees of Australia’s four major banks to apply for the credit and risk management roles.
BoCAL notes in the advertisements that candidates with major bank experience would be “highly regarded”.
Bank of China’s recent success in the local retail banking market has been driven, in part, by its ability to poach senior talent from the four major banks.
A string of former NAB managers have helped to shape the company’s banking strategy, including Stephen Anschau who has led the expansion of BoCAL’s relationship banking footprint in metropolitan centres.
BoCAL also poached Petar Cirica from CBA last year to take up a key leadership role as director of client coverage.
The latest staff expansion comes as little surprise to participants in the local mortgage market who have been observing – with some measure of amazement - the repositioning of BoCAL’s local brand.
Since 2017 the Chinese state-owned subsidiary has refocused its business strategy on targeting Australian citizens and permanent residents by capping lending to non-resident borrowers at 20 per cent of new lending.
The business results that followed this decision have been stunning.
Since 2018 BoCAL has been the Australia’s fastest-growing retail bank lender and deposit-taker.
In the 12 months to the end of December last year the bank expanded its home loan book by 73 per cent to A$2.6 billion.
BoCAL’s holdings of retail deposits doubled to $2.2 billion in the last 24 months.
While the pandemic interrupted the subsidiary’s growth in the June half, BoCAL recently sharpened its pricing of fixed rate mortgages, a move that is almost certain to push its mortgage book to above $4 billion by the end of December.
BoCAL is now promoting two-year and three-year fixed rate home loans to mortgage brokers that are priced at 2.19 per cent.
That puts its fixed rate products on a competitive footing with the four major banks that have been able to dominate new business flows in recent months by tapping cheap funds through the Reserve Bank’s Term Funding Facility.
There is an expectation that BoCAL will continue to accelerate lending growth in the next year by negotiating wholesale funding deals with other home lenders.
Banking Day understands that BoCAL is particularly interested in establishing warehouse funding arrangements with well-known Australian mortgage brands.
The bank is also investing heavily in a new digital platform to service mortgage brokers after the Bank of China name was added to the panels of several aggregators in the last year.
BoCAL mortgages are now marketed through AFG, Connective, The Home Loan Group and the Choice aggregation platforms.