I was going to write about debt to income ratios, following the Reserve Bank's Financial Stability Report today. I'll leave that alone for another day, except to say holding off on introducing them is good news.

What's interesting at the moment is the growing number of players now in the mortgage broker space. I had a good interview with SBS chief executive Shaun Drylie yesterday about what they were up too.

Drylie has only been at the helm of the bank for a short time, but he has a deep understanding of the mortgage adviser space as he used to run it for ASB. My guess is that he is a good appointment, not just for SBS but for mortgage advisers.

I get to see NZFSG's monthly numbers and they show SBS has been making good progress in third party distribution. The big banks appear to be struggling. For example ANZ's volumes have fallen significantly over the second half of this year.

In this story Drylie talks about changes SBS has made in third party distribution, his views on trail commission and also some other observations.

Another story this week which fits with my theme is Heartland Bank's planned re-entry to residential home loans. Heartland works with mortgage advisers with its Home Equity release product; its strategy around home loans is going to be a little different to what others are doing here.

My third example is Southern Cross which has set up a peer to peer lending service. I'm not surprised by this move as it is a logical step to take for any business running a contributory mortgage type of product. P2P is something advisers should learn about as other providers offer property finance through this type of platform.

There is also a good little update on Avanti Finance here too.