Customer numbers at Bendigo’s Up brand “continue to grow above 25 per cent each year, and deposits are growing even more strongly” management told an Investor Day in Sydney yesterday.
“We’re growing as fast as ever” was the heading on one slide, rebutting industry gossip that Up may be losing its mojo since Bendigo took full control of Up from the fintech Ferocia a couple of years ago.
Customer numbers at Up exceed 840,000, which places Up a little in front on NAB’s ubank brand in the digital bank disruptor stakes.
?Deposit balances via Up exceed $2 billion. This compares with total deposits for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank of $71 billion at March 2024.
Up Home, a mortgage offering, “is tracking well ahead of targets for FY2020”.
Home loan applications via Up are running at around 800 a month, though the number settled each month so far is around 200.
So far, via Up, Bendigo has settled $370 million in Up Home Loans, with $500 million in “identified home savings.”
In a break from its original positioning (in 2018) as a largely fee-free provider of simple banking products, earlier this year Bendigo began to trial “Up High”, an opt-in “subscription offering” with monthly fees beginning from $25.
One feature so far on offer to early adopters is the capacity to add notes and files (such as images) to transactions.
On the horizon is the “the ‘Essentials Saver’ - a separate account for bills ‘that will contain the smarts to automatically transfer just the right amount of money from your spending account to cover regular bills’.”
Bendigo yesterday said around 5000 Upsiders had signed on to the trial of Up High.