Lender spotlight: Great Southern Bank’s focus on broker feedback

Great Southern Bank has built broker trust through consistency and a feedback-focused approach. This analysis explores the performance of one of the Broker Pulse’s Listening Lenders who are using the insights shared in the Broker Pulse survey to improve their offerings to brokers.

Key stats you need to know

• Great Southern Bank’s Net Promoter Score 3-month moving average (3mma) hit +63 in June, up from +42 in April. BDM satisfaction 3mma rose to 90% in June, with back-to-back gains across Q2. Average turnaround time 3mma dropped to 4.7 business days, the fastest rolling result of the year.
  
  
• Brokers are asking for better communication & visibility and improved turnaround times. While praising the bank for easy to use services, they highlighted weaknesses in their processes/technology stack.
  
  
• The bank’s response is focused on direct communication with brokers rather than back channel messaging and a renewed focus on personalising their communications with the channel.

Great Southern Bank’s recent performance as a high-performing lender

• Great Southern Bank’s 3mma Net Promoter Score climbed from +42 in April to +63 in June. Promoter share averaged 68% over the past three months, while detractors remained under 6%. Passive sentiment softened from 36% in April to 27% in June.
  
  
• Off the back of broker feedback, Great Southern Bank’s recent turnaround times have been reduced by a full business day, from 5.9 days in April to 4.71 days in June 2025.

Great Southern Bank’s performance has proven to be consistently positive in the eyes of brokers with a strong track record of extremely positive Net Promoter scores and relatively consistent turnaround times. The lender generally outperforms its mutual bank counterparts across most metrics, but is behind market leaders such as Macquarie who exceed on speed.

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Direct broker feedback

In exploring the direct broker comments from brokers who have used Great Southern Bank, we can reveal a few underlying areas that they outperform the market and highlight areas for improvement.

1. Communication & visibility

Several brokers expressed concern about the lack of transparency during the application process. A recurring theme was difficulty in tracking progress or understanding key milestones such as settlement bookings:

• "Not enough visibility of the application progress, sometimes communication is not received when it’s all through the back channel messages."

• "More visibility of the application progress, particularly settlement booking dates and times. We received backchannel to say the file is booked but not the settlement booking details."

Brokers are calling for clearer, real-time updates throughout the lending journey. Relying solely on back-channel communication appears to be causing confusion and missed details. Enhancing visibility, perhaps via a portal or more structured communication, could significantly improve the broker experience.

2. Turnaround time & operational delays

Many comments indicated frustrations with processing delays and outdated manual systems:

• "Could improve turnaround times."
  
  
• "Turnaround time is too long."
  
  
• "Remove manual assessment and document system as this caused major delays in both the assessment and document signing."

While some brokers acknowledged the overall quality as positive, the recurring mention of long turnaround times suggests operational inefficiencies. Manual document handling and outdated systems are contributing to slow processing. Automating more steps in the assessment and signing process (e.g. adopting DocuSign) could reduce friction.

This type of feedback has since informed changes in Great Southern Bank, with the most recent data showing a full day’s reduction in turnaround times for June 2025. This is just one example of the many insights they’ve since obtained and acted upon.

3. Positive feedback on service and process

While many comments were constructive, a few brokers praised the lender’s service quality, highlighting the strong customer service and smooth experiences in some cases:

• "Excellent customer service lender, thank you."
  
  
• "Always seamless and good to deal with.”

At the same time, some pointed to system frustrations:

• "Please introduce DocuSign docs!!! Very antiquated and confusing doc process."

While service levels and rate competitiveness are appreciated, legacy systems (especially documentation processes) are detracting from the overall experience. The call to modernize workflows is strong and urgent.

How Great Southern Bank is using broker feedback to drive cross-team change

• Great Southern Bank uses the results of the Broker Pulse monthly survey to gather insights that align teams across the value chain from settlements to marketing.
  
  
• This cross-functional scorecard ensures all teams share accountability for broker outcomes, avoiding internal silos and improving their ability to act on broker feedback quickly.

“As a result of working together, Great Southern Bank’s settlements performance was benchmarked against PEXA’s on-time settlement rate, and now Great Southern Bank has ranked #1 in 23 of the past 24 months. 

Credit managers now speak directly to brokers rather than relying on backchannel communication. Marketing campaigns are now broker-specific, including the Broker Boost initiative offering $10,000 in business support instead of conventional merchandise.” said Brendon Prior, Senior Manager, Broker Performance at Great Southern Bank.

“Broker Pulse enables us to see how we’re landing in the market. Perception and reality can be two different things. We have aligned scorecard measures to ensure we all have impact. Having a measure like broker NPS as a key measure has a powerful impact on what matters, driving the right change whether it be process or policy.” he added.

About Broker Pulse: Residential Lending

Broker Pulse is a monthly survey of residential mortgage lenders conducted by Agile Market Intelligence. It is a community-driven knowledge base of lender performance. Broker Pulse offers transparency to the market by surfacing these collective insights from the broker community. This empowers brokers to make informed decisions and enables lenders to benchmark and improve performance.

Participating brokers receive access to a bird’s-eye view of the lender benchmarking data each month. To sign up or for more information, click here.

The June 2025 edition of Broker Pulse is based on responses from 282 residential brokers, collected between 1 and 16 July 2025. Brokers were asked to share their experiences with the lenders they worked with throughout May, rating them across turnaround time, credit assessment, BDM interactions, and the overall broker journey.