Finance Insider

The Australian completion regulator says it will make public its final decision over whether NAB will be given approval to acquire AXA Asia Pacific Holdings (APH) on Thursday. It remains to be seen whether NAB has done enough in the long running takeover saga to satisfy the concerns of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and finally be given approval to go ahead with the merger valued at $13.3 billion.

A leading investment bank says that Australian lenders should raise their mortgage lending rate before the year is out, and need to do so independently of the interest rate cycle of the central bank. This would soften the impact of rising funding costs, according to UBS analysts. Australian lenders consistently cite the higher cost of funding on wholesale credit markets, as hurting their profitability.

The Australian home loan sector continues to remain weak, enabling the Reserve Bank of Australia to maintain interest rates steady leading economists say. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Australian housing finance commitments for owner-occupied housing rose 1.7 per cent in July. The marginal increase in lending failed to impress Savanth Sebastian, an economist for CommSec, who said the rise compared to the over all decline in mortgage lending during 2010 was "effectively a drop in the ocean",

Gail Kelly, chief executive of Australian banking major Westpac, has appointed a veteran of the lender Jane Kittel, as the new chief of its South Australian unit Bank SA.Ms. Kittel has worked at Westpac for 15 years, and served most recently as the general manager of Westpac’s Pacific banking operations. Kittel will be taking over the role at Bank SA from Rob Chapman, who himself was elevated to the position of chief executive of another Westpac unit St. George. Mrs. Kelly lauded Ms. Kittel as one of the lenders most experience executives, who successfully steered Wetspac’s Pacific region though a volatile last few years.

A fund manager with holdings in both Bank of Queensland, and Bendigo & Adelaide Bank has backed a proposed $5.5 billion merger plan between the two lenders, even going so far as to demand that a merger takes place. Geoff Wilson, chairman of fund manager Wilson Asset Management has said that the boards of both lenders should indeed consider the merger, which makes both strategic and legal sense.