ANZ Chief softens on Asian earnings targets
(12 February 2016 – Asia) Australia and New Zealand Banking Group’s (ANZ) newly appointed chief, Shayne Elliott has told Fairfax that the bank failed to recognise that some Asian nations would grow hostile to foreign banks following 2008 global financial crisis.
Speaking to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), Elliott said that judgement error has proved a hurdle to the bank’s growth ambitions in the region.
ANZ, is the only one of the Australia’s “Big Four” to have made a concerted push into Asia, driven by its previous chief executive, Mike Smith, who had envisaged the bank earning 25-30 percent of the group's 2017 earnings from offshore.
"In hindsight we should have done it differently," Elliott told the AFR.
He added "Earnings from Asia may be 35 percent or 15 percent - I don't care, so long as the objective is driving value," he said. "It may be that the Asia business ends up a little bit smaller."
According to East & Partners Asia’s Institutional Transaction Banking Markets report, ANZ has surpassed local lenders such as United Overseas Bank and CIMB as a “primary transaction banker”, the business still lags considerably behind the region’s biggest financial institutions.
The bank’s Deputy Chief Executive Graham Hodges in charge of selling the bank's minority stakes in banks in Indonesia, Malaysia and China.