Bank has already bought RBS assets in southeast Asia.
The in-principle approval received by ANZ, Australia’s fourth-largest lender, has opened up an opportunity for it to bid for the Indian assets being disposed of by Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
Estimates say RBS’ retail units in China, India and Malaysia are valued at around $450 million or Rs 2,052 crore together.
ANZ had already bought some Asian assets of RBS to focus on Asian markets.
In August 2009, the bank bought RBS assets in Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Philippines and Vietnam for $550 million.
Assets in India and China were not pursued as in-principle approvals from the regulatory authorities were not received.
As per domestic guidelines, ANZ needed to have a banking licence before it could own such assets.
ANZ’s chief executive, Mike Smith is targeting to earn $1.5 billion from Asia in 2012 and to achieve this target, India is certainly a key market for the bank.
“ANZ, which is now focusing on China and southeast Asia, will be interested in the RBS assets it did not buy once it clears regulatory hurdles in India and China,” Smith said in Sydney recently.
Currently, HSBC is in advanced discussions to buy some Indian assets of RBS.
In fact, as per sources, the former has asked for the views of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on a potential takeover and is expected to revert to RBS on details of the final deal.
But the deal is yet to go through, potentially giving ANZ a chance.
An RBI official declined to comment.
But there is a bit of negative legacy that ANZ will have to contend with. ANZ Grindlays, the former avatar of the bank in India, was involved in a dispute with the RBI in the early 1990s over cheque payments in India.
Later, in 2000, it sold Grindlays’ 41 branches to Standard Chartered for $1.3 billion.
The deal was a boon to Standard Chartered as it merged Grindlays with its existing operations and became the largest foreign bank in India and its neighbouring nations. Standard Chartered was also eyeing the Indian assets of RBS, but the deal did not click as the two parties could not reach an agreement on commercial terms.
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