Small bank aims to be big hitter

Queensland Country Bank boss Aaron Newman wants the lender to become a bigger hitter as it prepares to sponsor the Brisbane Heat this season.

Brisbane Heat women’s team in action last year.

Queensland Country Bank boss Aaron Newman is looking forward to padding up for the Brisbane Heat this season and it’s not just because he loves cricket.

The Townsville-based lender is now a major sponsor of the BBL franchise, replacing Great Southern Bank, with its logo set to be plastered all over the Gabba and players’ uniforms from the first home game of the 2024/25 season scheduled for next month.

Newman, a career banker, tells your diarist, the sponsorship deal with last year’s Big Bash champs was considered the best bang for Queensland Country Bank’s marketing buck as it attempts to burnish its credentials as the ‘real Queensland bank.’

Newman says he is looking forward to picking up a few disaffected Suncorp Bank customers after the previously Queensland-based lender was taken over by Melbourne-based ANZ earlier this year. And Newman has a healthy-looking war chest to expand its customer base throughout the state after selling the bank’s health fund to HPF last year for a reported $185m. He says this will not only fund the bank’s digital transformation, but help it pick up market share in the increasingly tough mortgage market.

Queensland Country Bank CEO Aaron Newman.

While Queensland Country Bank’s typical customer is a mum and dad working in regional Queensland, Newman also wants to expand the lender’s business banking operation that typically attracts higher margins.

With total assets of $3.6bn and 28 branches around the state, Queensland Country Bank has come a long way from its roots in Mt Isa in the early 1970s.

At the time it was known as the Isa Mine Employee’s Credit Union, serving the employees of Mount Isa Mines (MIM) and their related companies.

By the late 1970s it had expanded into North Queensland’s sugar growing regions before changing its name to Queensland Country Credit Union.

Newman says the cost-of-living crisis, while tough for many people, is not showing up in loan arrears, with defaults actually below historical levels. He says that’s because most of his customers in key regional areas have jobs.

Funding injection

Brisbane-based biotech Vaxxas has received a $9.7m boost from life sciences financier Endpoints Capital as it boosts development of its needle-free vaccine technology. Vaxxas chief financial officer Doug Cubbin says that having access to funds allows the firm to keep progressing R&D activities without delay. Earlier this year Vaxxas reached a major manufacturing milestone, producing its 100th batch of needle‐free vaccine patches at Brisbane’s Translational Research Institute (TRI) – technology that may soon play an important role in protecting Australians against infectious diseases.

Vaxxas chief executive David Hoey at the company new factory.

Vaxxas’ secret sauce tech is a small patch with thousands of vaccine‐coated microprojections that can be applied to the skin for just a few seconds to efficiently deliver vaccine to immune cells just below the skin’s surface. Vaxxas’ 100th batch milestone coincides with the company’s official “graduation” from Queensland‐based TRI, which has been its home since 2015. The firm is now housed in a new purpose‐built 5,500sqm headquarters at Hamilton, which officially opened mid‐last year.

Down Down

Young staff member at Coles Ascot this week was spotted furiously ripping down the yellow “discount” tags on a series of items in the confectionery aisle. That came days after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced it would be launching legal action against Coles and Woolworths for allegedly making misleading claims about discounts. Coincidence? Surely not.

Originally published as Small bank aims to be big hitter