After more than six and a half years as ANZ’s boss, Shayne Elliott appears to have had an epiphany: the Melbourne-based bank desperately needs to bolster how much business it does with the country’s households and small and medium-sized businesses.for forking out about $5 billion to acquire the banking business of the Queensland-based Suncorp Group?
This is, however, well below the $151 billion peak it reached in March 2020, as pandemic panic gripped financial markets, and desperate corporates rushed to ensure they had enough cash on hand to survive the crisis. This means that when it comes to home lending, ANZ is the undisputed wooden spoon holder of the big four banks.
In other words, according to the APRA stats, Commonwealth Bank commands an impressive 25.7 per cent of the owner-occupier home loan market and 26.2 per cent of the investor home loan market.Westpac can claim 20.7 per cent of the owner-occupier home loan market and 23.2 per cent of the investment home lending market, while NAB has 13.9 per cent of the owner-occupier home loan market, and 15.8 per cent of the investor home lending market.
This combined ANZ-Suncorp mortgage portfolio would be catapulted into third position in the home loan market, with 15.4 per cent of the owner-occupier home lending market, and 15.4 per cent of the investment housing loan market. If ANZ does spend north of $5 billion to claw back the market share it has squandered after failing for years to match the approval turnaround times of rival lenders, the pressure will be on ANZ’s head of retail banking,Carnegie, who is widely seen as the ANZ’s heir apparent to Elliott, has headed the controversial ANZ Plus digital project aimed at transforming the bank’s core retail and commercial banking platforms to improve speed and capability.
Good plan for both ANZ and Suncorp