Unfairly blending a couple of mortgage metrics on Friday qualifies the tone of our lead article that day around of Macquarie Bank’s arguably high-risk appetite for a fast growing, record-growing mortgage book.
By soon after noon, Banking Day appended a response from Macquarie. It was interesting to see that group/bank distinction is dissolving – that’s one of my takeaways from a valuable catch-up with the bank as we sorted this out.
Finding a second footing in the Banking Day archive and to draw attention of all readers to an important correction, here’s Macquarie’s head of personal banking, Ben Perham, responding to our story from Friday:
The credit quality of Macquarie’s mortgage book is one of the strongest in the industry.
With 0.4 per cent of home loans on COVID-19 payment pause, well below the industry average, Macquarie has deferred just 561 of more than 150,000 facilities at the request of clients due to the ongoing impacts of the pandemic.
Adding interest only deferrals to investor loan deferrals, without taking into account the fact that most investor facilities are also interest only, effectively double counts the numbers used.
Macquarie’s mortgage book growth has been driven by a deliberate, strategic focus on lower risk lending centred around the sub 80 per cent loan to value ratio (LVR) lending tier.
In line with our focus on lower risk lending, Macquarie’s proportion of high LVR lending (defined by APRA in this context as lending above 90 per cent LVR) is so low that the data has been excluded from the public APRA disclosures.
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