Heritage Bank will close loan administration centres in Sydney and Melbourne at the end of the month after deciding to centralise processing of broker-originated mortgages across the country.The bank's general manager of retail services, Paul Francis, told Banking Day that the Toowoomba-based mutual had invested heavily in new technology platforms in the last year and wanted to ensure that document processing and approval times were made nationally consistent."The broker network is really important to us," Francis said."Brokers want consistency of service and from time to time trying to manage three processing centres created inefficiencies."Under the restructure announced to brokers this week the bank will relocate all document processing functions currently performed in Sydney and Melbourne to its Brisbane office.The revamp will result in eleven redundancies outside Queensland, but the bank's existing complement of state managers and business development managers will not change.In a memo sent to brokers across the country the bank's head of broker distribution, Michael Trencher, said centralising loan processing would help the lender better manage swings in demand."Our national presence is a key element of our service offering, and that will not change," he told brokers."We believe that centralising our processing function into one office will enable us to deliver a better overall service to our broker partners, wherever they are located."We will have a team of dedicated, expert processing staff located under the one roof, with capacity to scale up and handle workloads from right across the country, as needed." Heritage was one of the first customer-owned lenders to enter the broker market in the 1990s. Today, brokers write about half the bank's mortgage business.According to lending data published by APRA, Heritage's mortgage book grew by around ten per cent, or A$650 million, to $7.23 billion over the eleven months to the end of May 2017.Heritage recorded a full year net profit of $36.1 million in 2016, but Francis declined to comment on the financial performance of the company in the 12 months to the end of June.