Australia Gets its Royal Commission – But to What End?
4 December, 2017
Euromoney Alternative Awards: The Most Tenuous Belt and Road Deal
1 January, 2018Euromoney, January 2018
See the whole Alternative Awards series here
Shayne Elliott listens to his shareholders. The ANZ chief executive hears loud and clear that they want his bank to be dull and domestic, and he has set about giving them what they want.
Step one has been scaling down the previously ambitious presence in Asia. Minority stakes in banks across the region, although difficult to shift, are on the block; it’s out of Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank already and the rest will follow when the right bids come. A chunk of wealth-related businesses in Asia were sold to DBS this year. Others have simply been scaled back.
But why stop there? There are things to sell at home too!
In October, the bank clinched the sale of its OnePath pension and investments business and its aligned dealer groups to IOOF for just under A$1 billion ($764 million). And, truth be told, it was disappointed with the outcome: it had hoped to sell more and still wants to jettison its remaining insurance and wealth operations.
Perish the thought, but is ANZ starting to go the way of another three-initialled bank that once had big overseas ambitions and is now a shrinking domestic institution that those in global finance never bother to mention? The irony of course is that ANZ’s biggest international push was buying RBS’s Asian business in 2009 under Elliot’s predecessor Mike Smith.
We understand the industrial logic of all of this: shareholders believe banks are better at core lending than anything else and that they deliver the best returns when they stick to their knitting.
But followed to its natural conclusion, Elliott is going to end up left with a single ATM in Melbourne. With a royal commission on banking on the cards, the big four all down on their luck and being attacked hard by new, online banking platforms and the ‘All bankers are bastards’ bandwagon rolling on in Australia, perhaps it is not such a bad strategy after all.
Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b15ycp8w61676n/alternative-awards-of-the-year-2017#damon?copyrightInfo=true
