BOQ is one of Australia's leading challenger banks. We pride ourselves on building long-term customer relationships supported by banking products that genuinely meet our customers' financial needs. Our strategy is to focus on niche segments where customers value a more intimate banking relationship.
We're on a mission to prove it's possible to love a bank. Our customer satisfaction and advocacy scores have soared over the last 4 years. We've come a long way, but we're not there just yet - we want to be Australia's most loved bank. We'll get there by making it easier for our customers to deal with us, growing our business the right way, finding better ways to do things and enhancing our customer-focused culture.
We have a committed Executive Team delivering our strategy and an experienced Board of Directors overseeing our financial performance and ensuring strategic delivery continues to add value for our shareholders.
Find out how our Corporate Governance helps us manage risk and add value. Further disclosure on how we responsibly manage our business and positively engage with out stakeholders is available on the sustainability section of our website.
Dear Shareholders,
BOQ has delivered an increased profit for a fourth successive year. This is a particularly good result in a challenging market, with net profit after tax increasing to $360 million and statutory profit after tax growing to $338 million. Given these results, the Board has declared a final dividend of 38 cents per share, taking the full year dividend to a record 76 cents per share.
2016 has been a difficult year for the banking sector. Global economic uncertainty has driven market volatility, and domestically the economy continues to shift from its traditional reliance on mining investment. The low interest rate environment and competition for both lending and deposit growth has created margin pressure on both the asset and liability sides of the industry. Additionally, uncertainty remains around the next phase of banking industry regulation.
These market conditions reinforce the need for BOQ to continue to deliver its strategy. 2016 was a positive year for the bank as we broaden our distribution channels, focussed on niche customer segments, improved our process capabilities and continued to create a culture that is a source of competitive advantage.
Most importantly, we’ve continued to implement our strategy without compromising credit quality and we’ve stayed ahead of the regulatory curve with conservative lending policies and capital ratios. We believe we’ve achieved the right balance between growth, asset quality and profitability to build a portfolio that performs throughout the business cycle. We would like to thank the collective efforts of everyone across the BOQ Group that has made this result possible.
2016 has also seen some major governance changes at Board level. During the year we farewelled long-standing director Carmel Gray who has provided wise counsel over nearly a decade of service on the Board. We also farewelled director Neil Berkett whose extensive experience across the finance, digital media and telecommunications sectors provided the Board with important insight following the acquisition of Virgin Money Australia. We thank Carmel and Neil for their invaluable service and wish them all the best for the future.
We were also delighted to welcome some new faces to the Board. Karen Penrose joined in November, John Lorimer in January and more recently Warwick Negus, joined in September. Karen has 30 years’ business experience in the finance and corporate sectors, offering specialist knowledge in finance and capital markets, risk management and compliance. John has more than 20 years in financial services and brings significant expertise in retail financial services, governance, regulation and risk management. Warwick’s extensive financial services industries background adds more than 20 years’ experience in investment banking and domestic and international funds management. We believe, these additions give the Board the right skills and experience to meet the needs of a rapidly changing market, and so we warmly welcome Karen, John and Warwick to the Board.
Finally, we’d also like to thank all of our shareholders for your strong ongoing support during 2016. This has enabled us to build a strong and profitable business that is delivering record earnings whilst maintaining a high quality loan portfolio and is positioning BOQ well for the future.
This year we’ve continued to deliver on this by:
We've opened up a range of new customer channels, but there's more we can do to empower our customers to bank their way. Over the next few years we'll continue expanding our broker presence for both BOQ and Virgin Money Australia. We'll also continue upgrading our digital channels improving our mobile apps for Virgin Money Australia and BOQ, upgrading our website platform across the Group, and upgrading to the latest smart ATMs with touch screens. We'll also be introducing e-signatures, an important milestone to being able to offer online lending applications.
We’ve got strong foundations, but we’re not done yet. We’re maturing our deposit strategy by identifying key product and service gaps for priority customer segments which will help ensure we fund future asset growth at the right price. We’ll further develop the risk functions alignment with the broader business to support strategy and by leveraging technology and data analytics we'll continue to build out the efficiency and quality of our credit decisions. We’ll also be uplifting our compliance management framework from Australian to global standards.
This year we’ve continued to deliver on this by:
But we've only just scratched the surface, the most exciting part of our digital journey is still to come. In the years ahead we’ll bring more products onto the lending origination system, introduce more automation in our commercial lending processes, and launch BOQ Finance’s new Lease Management System providing more cost and time efficiency across the Bank.
We'll continue maturing our data analytics, building a single view of customers regardless of which brand they’re with, to help us service our key customer segments. This will allow us to make more integrated risk and pricing decisions and ultimately, provide more personalised customer service.
We’re focused on uplifting our project management and digital capability to introduce more accelerated ways of working. This will be supported by extending video conferencing to more meeting rooms which will increase staff collaboration across the country and reduce travel expenses.
We’ll be streamlining and digitising processes to improve the customer on-boarding process across products. We’ll finish rolling out wifi to all our branches and we’ll continue to leverage our relationships with key vendors to drive more collaboration, co-investment and innovation. Where there are gaps in our capability and it makes sense to do so, we’ll investigate partnership opportunities with fintechs whose offerings align with our niche customer strategy.
This year we’ve continued to deliver on this by:
And while we’re definitely likable, we’ve still got a lot more love to give! Next year our flexible working policy will be piloted in more parts of our business such as our contact centres and branches. We’ll introduce a new internal female leadership development program and streamline our leadership on-boarding process. We’ll broaden our range of ethics training to cover more employees and more topics through online delivery. We’ll also work hard to continue lifting our customer satisfaction scores to live our vision of being Australia’s most loved bank.