Westpac’s RAMS brand has ceased taking applications for new home finance.
Local RAMS Home Loan Centres will also soon close, RAMS informed clients earlier this week.
This follows a strategic review of RAMS announced by the bank in November. Efforts by Westpac to sell RAMS earlier this year attracted little interest.
Ever since taking over the crumbling RAMS business following the worst of the financial crisis 15 years ago, RAMS has never seemed to fully find its place within Westpac world.
For unknown reasons, year after year and in result after result, Westpac studiously omitted sharing any guidance on the relevance of RAMS to its wider mortgage or deposit business. In fact, what surely needed to be complete and aggregated data on many aspects of Westpac’s business in financial reporting have invariably been qualified: “except RAMS”.
So it was a bit of a surprise on Tuesday to learn, via the Westpac announcement, that the RAMS mortgage book is $311.8 billion. This represents seven per cent of Westpac’s mortgage book as at June of $476 billion, but, more than likely, a much lower share of new home loan business flows.
Westpac, “is retaining the current RAMS loan portfolio but as part of simplifying its business, it will no longer be accepting new RAMS home loan applications” RAMS explained at its website.
Existing RAMS customers’ loans “will remain in place” and customers will continue to access service through the myRAMS app, website and call centre.
It appears applications in the pipeline will still be considered, and funded.
RAMS home loans customers will still be able to open new RAMS Deposit Accounts.