Australia's big banks largely escaped the catastrophic effects of the global financial crisis, known colloquially in the country as 'the GFC'. Fairly tight regulation, a resilient domestic housing market and lack of big exposures to the global credit derivatives market certainly helped. As did the concentration of market share in the hands of the 'big four' - ANZ, Commonwealth Bank (CBA), National Australia Bank (NAB) and Westpac.
But there are concerns that the domestic market has now become too concentrated, to the detriment of competition. As market share for everything from retail deposits to home loans and wealth management become dominated by the big four, their options for non-organic growth have also become limited domestically. This has led ANZ to pursue a pan-Asian bank strategy, which began with its acquisition of some of Royal Bank of Scotland's (RBS) assets, and is likely to continue into 2010 given its current acquisitive capital structure.
