ACCC tipped to green light ANZ’s Suncorp buy

ANZ agreed to buy Suncorp in July for $4.9bn.

The drums are beating loudly that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is set to approve ANZ Bank’s acquisition of Suncorp.

ANZ agreed to buy Suncorp in July for $4.9bn and the competition watchdog in July said that it had started a review of the proposed acquisition.

The deal will be one of the first major decisions for newly appointed ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb and is an important deal for the banking industry overall.

On one hand, the decision could set a precedent for other mergers among the regional banks.

Yet another view is that with Suncorp under ANZ’s ownership, NAB recently buying Citi’s Australian retail bank and Westpac buying St George Bank more than a decade ago, it creates a lot of concentration already.

It creates little opportunity for any more without substantially increasing market power among only a limited number of players.

Should one of ANZ or Suncorp’s rivals launch a major, public campaign opposing the transaction, it may have been in more jeopardy.

Bendigo Adelaide Bank had been keen to buy Suncorp, and had hired Bank of America in the hope of embarking on a merger.

It made noise about the deal initially, and was expected to continue voicing opposition to the tie-up with ANZ after appointing corporate affairs company GRACosway in what suggested a major media campaign was afoot.

But Bendigo Adelaide Bank has been relatively quiet about the deal.

At its annual general meeting, Suncorp’s chairman described a merger with a regional bank as an option that was “inferior”.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank may have taken the view that it would not have been successful in a transaction should the ANZ tie-up be blocked anyway.

Elsewhere, Delorean Corp announced on Wednesday it had entered into a funding deal with Palisade Impact for the first of what will be a number of bioenergy projects in the future, using bio-waste to create energy.

Advising on the transaction was Planum Partners.