ANZ has quietly debuted its new fully digital home loan service on ANZ Plus, its digital-only consumer banking offering released earlier this year, with chief executive Shayne Elliot revealing the mortgage service will eventually become the bank’s primary channel for onboarding and servicing home loans.

The fully digital home loan, now live, is currently limited to a select group of ANZ Plus customers, Elliot confirmed: those who are single, are seeking to refinance, are PAYG income-only, have less than an 80 per cent loan-to-value ratio (LVR), and require no offset account.

“What we’ve got to do is just expand the pipe slowly,” Elliot said during the company’s full year results briefing.

“Our plan is to get over the next 12 months where the eligibility for that will be somewhere around 10 per cent of the addressable market.”

ANZ Plus, which debuted in March this year, is the bank’s dedicated mobile app-only retail banking offering. ANZ Plus is a deliberate shift away from the traditionally “commoditised” banking experience, Elliot said, to a more holistic “financial wellbeing” offering.

Elliot boasts that the entire ANZ Plus loans process – from the commencement of the application through to settlement – can be completed within 45 minutes.

“There’s a lot of stuff being written out there or [lenders] pretending to be digital, but what you’ll find is there’s still significant human intervention somewhere along the way, mostly in the assessment or settlement process.

“We’ve built a truly digital way… [for] the customer,” Elliot said.

Over time, but “not within the next year or two”, he confirmed that ANZ Plus will become the bank’s primary channel for mortgage origination.

By early 2024, Elliot said ANZ Plus will expand its home loan offering with an offset account product, alongside the introduction of joint banking accounts.

He added that ANZ is also currently building out a dedicated broker offering on Plus, though he declined to offer a concrete timetable for its launch.

“One day – not next year, or the year after – ANZ Plus will be our predominant channel.

“We want to expand ANZ Plus out as quickly as we can for obvious reasons – it’s better for customers, it’s far far lower costs for us, and [offers] better outcomes from a risk and responsible banking point of view.”

On a like-for-like basis, he said, the costs of onboarding and servicing customers are 20 per cent lower on the ANZ Plus platform than on ANZ’s “classic” digital offering, the bank’s primary business today.

“What we’re suggesting is that gap will continue to grow as we get more and more scale [on ANZ Plus],” Elliot said.

“If you’re a customer using ANZ Plus, there’s many more self-service features here than we have in ‘classic’, and many more than our competitors.

“That means that people look after themselves, they like it better, and therefore the cost of servicing them from our perspective is far far lower.

“And they generate a better NPS score in doing so, because customers have got more control.”

He added that ANZ Plus will soon add a range of “cutting edge security features” as part of the bank’s wider ‘Scam Safe’ program.