Bank of Australasia
The Bank of Australasia was an Australian commercial bank with British roots. It operated in Australia and New Zealand and merged with Union Bank of Australia Limited in 1951 to form Australia and New Zealand Bank Limited (ANZ).
history
Australia
In early 1832, Thomas Potter Macqueen in London set up two companies in Australia, a bank and a whaling company. The whaling in the southeast of Australia flourished and Macqueen got proper attention. The financiers and bankers who gathered around this project were only interested in the founding project of the bank and extended the possible range of operations of the bank to Asia and South Africa . But the plan to establish a Royal Bank of Australasia and South Africa as a colonial bank did not work out. The interests of the British government, which itself operated two banks in the Cape Colony , were opposed. It only issued a bank formation permit for the colony of Australia. As a result, the Royal and South Africa were deleted from the name. In March 1834 the founding members of the bank received the Royal Charter .
In order to be able to start the bank in Australia , it made sense to take over the Cornwall Bank in Launceston , which was founded in 1828 , at that time still part of New South Wales . Cornwall Bank had fallen behind Tamar Bank, which was founded in 1834 , and so the shareholders of Cornwall Bank agreed to a takeover by the Bank of Australasia in October 1835.
In July 1840, the Bank of Australasia announced that it wanted to expand into Western Australia , but previously offered the Perth- based Bank of Western Australia a takeover. Barely a year later, in May 1841, the Bank of Western Australia, founded in 1837, was taken over. The Bank of Australasia survived the economic crisis of the 1840s, but had tied up its capital too tightly in the Bank of Australia to be able to actively operate in the difficult market. Stagnation was the result for a number of years.
By the late 1850s, Victoria had emerged as the most important banking territory for the Bank of Australasia. Therefore, in 1860 it was decided to move the bank's headquarters to Melbourne .
Between 1860 and 1875, the long economic boom, the Bank of Australasia had recovered, but also had to contend with increasing competition . Many new bank establishments made it difficult to do business, but only the Bank of Australasia managed to expand their operations to all of Australia during this time. In order to grow and gain market share , Australian banks opened branches regardless of their needs. In 1880, HG Turner , General Manager of the Commercial Bank of Australia criticized the fact that in Victoria with 326 bank branches there would be 2760 inhabitants per branch, whereas in England there would be 12,000 inhabitants per branch. In some places and districts there were up to 7 branches, where one or two branches would have been enough.
1880, after a long construction boom, 2/3 of all contracted in Victoria were loans on mortgages secured on land. When the situation came to a head at the end of the 1880s, the first financial crash that followed, 1891–1892, hit mainly the housing and finance companies that had emerged in the real estate boom of the 1880s. Between 1891 and 1993, 54 of them ceased business activities, 32 of them for good. Because bank customers tried to withdraw their deposits as quickly as possible, 26 banks had to temporarily close their doors between July 24, 1891 and June 8, 1892. But when the Commercial Bank of Australia closed for 30 days from April 5th, panic was triggered in the financial market. Twelve more banks followed with closings in quick succession, the Bank of Australasia was not among them.
By the Great Depression of 1929, the bank had established itself well in the market, but its market shares in business deposits, for example, were distributed very differently depending on the territory and ranged between 6.5 and 19.4%. The bank survived the economic crisis and the effects of the Second World War by operating cautiously, but was unable to develop further by adapting to new market conditions. Nevertheless, the bank was able to maintain its position as the fifth largest bank in Australia in 1944 with a balance sheet of just under £ 80 million, but could not come close to the Bank of New South Wales with a balance sheet total of over £ 200 million and thus number 1 among the banks. The Union Bank of Australia fared similarly at £ 83 million and ranked fourth on the list.
In order to expand, both banks looked for partners in the following years. Since the Bank of Australasia was more rooted in the industrial sector and the Union Bank of Australia had served more of the rural sector, they could complement each other sensibly through a merger. In addition, both colonial banks had their headquarters in London, where most of the shareholders were based . Nevertheless, the merger, also caused by amendments to the law, lasted more than 5 years. The decision to merge in December 1950 was finally implemented in October 1951. The result was Australia and New Zealand Bank Limited, which was later renamed Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, short form ANZ.
New Zealand
The Bank of Australasia appeared relatively late in the British colony of New Zealand in 1864 . In the same year it was granted permission to issue its own banknotes under British law , but with the Union Bank of Australia, the Bank of New Zealand and the Bank of New South Wales , three major competitors were already placed in the market. Accordingly, the bank could not achieve the same importance as the three aforementioned banks.
In 1893, the Bank Note Issue Act obliged all banks to secure their money with the equivalent in gold and to invest gold reserves . With the establishment of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand on August 1, 1934, the Bank of Australasia also lost its right to issue banknotes and eventually had to sell its gold reserves to the central bank .
In 1951, the New Zealand branch of the Bank of Australasia merged with the Union Bank of Australia, similar to that in Australia and England.
literature
- Sydney James Butlin : Australia and New Zealand Bank . Longmans, Green and Co., London 1961 (English).
Web links
- Early documents and newspaper articles on the Bank of Australasia in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chay Fisher, Christopher Kent: Two Depressions, One Banking Collapse . Ed .: Reserve Bank of Australia. Wellington June 1999 (Research Discussion Paper).
- ↑ Significant Events to 1900. (PDF; 161 kB) Australian Government, accessed on January 20, 2016 (English).
- ^ A b Ken Matthews: The legal history of money in New Zealand . In: Reserve Bank of New Zealand (ed.): Bulletin . Volume 66, No. 1 . Wellington March 2003 (English).
- ↑ The Bank-Note Issue Act 1893. (PDF; 2.6 MB) The Knowledge Basket - Legislation NZ, accessed on January 19, 2016 (English).