Why I applied for 1000 Bendigo Bank home loans in two months

BACKGROUND

FOUR years ago I wrote a background piece titled “Why I spent a year counting every bank in regional Australia” as an accompaniment to a feature examining the role of regional bank closures on Australia’s growing shadow economy.

The gist of it was that the work that went into collecting the data was just as much a part of the story as the broader subject I was tackling.

I find myself in the same position now, feeling the need to explain why I gave up the best part of two months applying for home loans through Bendigo Bank’s online lending platform, Bendigo Express.

There was no plan; it began, as most good stories do, with a moment of curiosity.

I was reporting on the closure of the Bendigo Bank in Queenstown, Tasmania, when I thought I would plug the town into the app and see what it came back with.

After just a few clicks I had an answer: ‘sorry – this process restricts against lending in certain suburbs, including Queenstown’.

At first, I thought it was about the remoteness of the town but I worked out quickly that adjacent postcodes that were just as remote were fine for home lending.

I expanded my search out to remote locations elsewhere in Australia – indigenous communities for example in Queensland and the Northern Territory. Again, they were given the thumbs up.

I looked at towns known for low socio-economic conditions. All fine.

The knockbacks started when I began to check the usual mining region suspects when it came to home lending blacklists in the north-west corner of Western Australia.

I wasn’t surprised about this but Queenstown was still a puzzle.

The only thing it appeared to have in common with other places that had been rejected was mining and a national home lending ban based on mining – or any particular industry – was unheard of.

Bendigo Bank having been built on the mining industry also made the possibility unlikely that this was a mining blacklist.

I continued plugging in locations with the aim of proving the theory wrong.

The results continued to support the existence of a mining blacklist based on postcodes, with the added factor that Bendigo was making exceptions for locations in its own backyard.

When it finally came to the point where I knew I could not ignore this story, the work really began.

I would not go out publicly with this until the results were indisputable and in the end that led to checking more than 1000 locations and recording the results with screenshots, all the while expecting to be shut out of the app at any time.

For some unknown reason, it continued to let me apply for loans until I was satisfied beyond any doubt Bendigo Bank was knocking back home loan applications in certain postcode areas due to their association with mining – including Queenstown where it was shutting the bank for under-performance.

Among other things, this is a story about a weakness in new technology exposing a bank’s underbelly.

This sort of discrimination may well have existed for a long time, and in other banks, but it was never something any of them would talk about publicly, so any speculation about its existence remained exactly that, speculation.  

Bendigo Bank’s foray into digital lending is different to other bank’s online application processes, which have a tighter level of scrutiny, meaning the research undertaken for this story would not be possible on any other site.

The vulnerability I found in the Bendigo Express application, if it had been identified by the bank, would probably not have been considered a big risk because the only way to obtain any meaningful information by exploiting it would be to invest a very large amount of time collecting data by hand.

It was a time and place scenario – Bendigo had generated so much discontent by its branch and agency closures that one journalist decided that the investment in hours that added up to weeks then months for this particular story was worth it.

MAIN STORY: Burning down the house: Bendigo Bank torches regional development with blacklist based on mining

Statement from West Coast Council

Mining blacklist coverage - Sky News

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