ANZ Group Market Share Gains Expected to Slow as Margins Come Into Focus

ANZ Group is the owner of ANZ Bank, the smallest of Australia's four major banks by market value and the largest bank in New Zealand and the Pacific, offering a full range of banking and financial services to the consumer, small business, and corporate sectors. Like the other major banks, ANZ Bank has a well-recognized and trusted bank brand, large advertising and marketing budget, and customer fulfilment capacity (branches, systems, funding capacity) to capitalize on this brand equity. We see the firm’s strategy to simplify and focus on its highly profitable core banking operations as logical. The proposed acquisition of Suncorp Bank came as a surprise but provides an avenue to leverage benefits of recent investment in its retail banking platform. Integration risk can not be ignored, but overall we believe the acquisition makes strategic sense.