The new brand is a 'natural evolution' for the business, says general manager
Non-bank lenders Homeloans and RESIMAC have announced their unification into a single new brand – Resimac – effective 3 December.
The unification comes following the merger of the two businesses in 2016, and the new brand will be used across Australia and New Zealand. According to joint Homeloans CEO Mary Ploughman, Resimac’s established brand will “resonate with key stakeholder groups” and is “taking the best of both worlds” into the new business.
“We see it as a natural evolution of the 2016 merger to unify into one brand,” RESIMAC Home Loans general manager Adrienne Church told NZ Adviser.
“We went to an external company to analyse the business and work through what the new brand should be, and it’s very exciting for us to be able to maintain one of the brands. We’re not killing the Homeloans brand either – we may be using that in other parts of the business further down the line, but the front brand for the business will be Resimac.”
“What’s exciting is that we really get to leverage the Australian brand, especially in the broker channel,” she explained. “They’ve got a $12 billion book over there and they do a lot of marketing and brand awareness work, so we’ll be able to leverage that halo effect here in New Zealand.”
Church says Resimac is also in the process of developing tools to help brokers explain non-bank offerings to their clients, and to build awareness around the brand and its products among the borrower base.
“Often when an adviser is sitting in front of a borrower, the question they get is ‘Who is Resimac?’ People know the likes of ASB and Westpac, but they don’t know us,” Church said. “That’s why we’re working on tools that explain to brokers who Resimac is and actually helps them sell a non-bank to a borrower. We’ve had a lot of investment over the last few months on front-end projects, and a lot of our work with the adviser channel is around awareness of what we do.”
The business will begin migrating customers onto the newly designed Resimac brand on 3 December. There will be no impact on customer loans, and all contact details will remain the same.
