Anz Reaps Rewards Of Regional Loyalty
The Age
Monday April 4, 2005
ELMER Funke Kupper, ANZ's head of Asia-Pacific operations, compares the bank's regional role to that of an Intel chip inside a computer - intellectual capital that boosts performance and provides strategic opportunities.
In the eight years since the Asian economic crisis devastated the region's banking system, many major US and European banks have gone home but ANZ has been strengthening its status as a friendly neighbour.The latest deal, a $35 million joint venture with Vietnam's Sacombank announced last month, is consistent with a growing number of Asia-Pacific operations ANZ is developing while also building relationships in China, the engine of regional growth.By mid-2006, ANZ plans to buy the maximum allowable 19.9 per cent in Shanghai Rural Credit Cooperatives Union, which is in the process of becoming a commercial bank. Last August it was also granted permission to provide local currency services to Chinese-owned enterprises that focus on Australian imports. Mr Kupper, who in 1997 took over the bank's risk management just as the Asian contagion swept the region, said he was confident the hard lessons had been learned by ANZ's partners, many of whose governments had financial reforms forced upon them by the International Monetary Fund.Decades of experience in the region have honed due diligence skills.ANZ's 11 offices around the region, traditionally for Australian and New Zealand trade finance, have been strategically refocused for intra-regional banking and consumer banking."We need to be openly seen to be local, rather than a foreign institution. We have decided to partner with local institutions that are building a franchise," Mr Kupper said.Investments had to "show enough" not to "break the bank" and partnerships needed to be calibrated at a pace that would "come to fruition" at the right time for both sides, he said.
© 2005 The Age