Five years ago, banking was all about closing branches and flogging high-fee wealth management products (that is, managed sharemarket investments) via trailing-commissioned financial planners.
Now it's all about opening branches again and flogging housing loans via, er, trailing-commissioned mortgage brokers.
Bankers talk about this as the natural swing of the strategic pendulum but it looks more like lurching from one mistake to another.
For one thing, the wealth management scramble picked the peak of the stockmarket boom; the 2003 property/housing loan scramble has picked the peak of the real estate boom.
And most banks paid too much for their wealth management entries because they thought that any business with government legislated volume growth would be a lay-down misere.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the planners captured the profit margin because they own the customers, not the anonymous bank "manufacturers".
Now the same thing is happening in lending.
In the past five years, mortgage brokers have gone from selling 10 per cent of home loans to 30 per cent. Analyst MISC Australia reports that broker generated loans rose 29 per cent in the December quarter to more than $13 billion for the first time.
The average margin on a housing loan these days is about 1.5 per cent - a third of what it was five years ago. (The average lending margin across all banking is 2.6 per cent because of the huge margins in the desperado end of the market, that is, credit cards and unsecured personal loans.)
Every time a bank originates a home loan through a broker rather than through a branch, half that 150 basis point margin is handed over to the broker, for the life of the loan.
So the mortgage broking industry is now pulling about $1 billion in trailing commissions a year.
Not surprisingly, everyone's now a mortgage broker. Membership of the Mortgage Industry Association rose 80 per cent in 2003 to 4400 but there are about 10,000 brokers around the country, all told, (although not all of them are gentlemen you would introduce to your mum).
Anyway, that means they're making an average of $100,000 a year each in commission; the best are making about $500,000, and the average is dragged down by those who like to play a bit of week-day golf.
On the whole, they are doing a lot better than salaried loans officers at the banks.
Meanwhile, according to APRA, the number of bank branches in Australia has actually risen in the past two years from 4789 to 4858.
So branch networks are no longer a variable cost - they are now a fixed and rising cost.
And as the amount of product being pushed through them declines in favour of brokers, the unit cost of the network rises exponentially.
That's what is behind the Commonwealth Bank's "Which New Jargon", sorry, "Which New Bank" program which CEO David Murray updated yesterday - probably the most comprehensive attempt to do something about the marginalisation of bank branches.
Murray has launched an expensive, all-singing, all-dancing, customer service computer software platform called CommSee, which is supported by a bewildering, syllable-heavy programme of cultural change, involving "services and sales management processes", "performance culture" and "world-class processing principles". Yes, it's a slogan-led recovery like many of these things but whatever works will be fine with shareholders.
The essence of it seems to involve turning every employee of the Commonwealth into a salesperson, which is more or less what every bank CEO has been trying to do for five years.
At CBA the job is harder, and requires more jargon, because the staff used to be public servants and therefore about as far from salespeople as it's possible to be.
Meanwhile, Murray has had a game of musical chairs in the executive suite with four chairs and five men. Michael Ullmer was the one left standing and is now sitting by the phone waiting for John Stewart at NAB to call.
The shrinkage in chair numbers at the top of the CBA was, we are assured, not designed to get rid of Ullmer but to put together rich customers with business customers into a division called Premium Business Services, under the management of Michael Katz (Ullmer used to run the business part of the bank).
Katz and Stuart Grimshaw (insurance and wealth management) are said to be the two succession peas at CBA now that Ullmer has been left by the side of the road.
But someone should tell them that Murray is never going to leave. He is Alan Greenspan. After 12 years, Murray sounds as fresh as when he started, spouting management jargon like a new MBA graduate.