The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) has officially put its stake in Indonesia’s Panin Bank on a formal auction as it seeks to divest its 39 percent stake in the said bank, Australian media reported on Monday.
ANZ’s stake in Indonesia’s Panin Bank, which is owned by the Gunawan family, is worth AUD1 billion, or about USD740 million, and the Australian bank wants to accelerate its exit to focus on other units and boost its capital position.
The sale also ends ANZ’s attempt to buy full control of the Indonesian bank, the report said, quoting unnamed sources.
Sources told The Australian that ANZ wants to accelerate its exit from Panin by putting the stake up through a formal auction, even as it already held talks with Mizuho Financial Group of Japan.
The sales process is handled by investment bank Goldman Sachs. Panin Bank is controlled by the Gunawan family.
PaninBank is one of the major commercial banks in Indonesia.
Established in 1971 in Jakarta, PaninBank is a merger of three banks – Bank Kemakmuran, Bank Industri Djaja Indonesia and Bank Industri & Dagang Indonesia.
In 1982, PaninBank listed its shares on the Jakarta Stock Exchange (now the Indonesia Stock Exchange), making it the first bank to go public in Indonesia.
As per the end of 2011, PaninBank had a business network of more than 440 branch offices in various cities in Indonesia, more than 700 Panin ATMs, connected with more than 30,000 ATM Bersama, 5000 ALTO ATMs, and 1.5 million Cirrus ATMs network worldwide.
Meanwhile, ANZ announced that it has formed a panel that will advice the bank’s board on digital business and emerging technologies.
The International Technology and Digital Business Advisory Panel will meet quarterly with the technology committee of the ANZ board.
“The board and our senior executive team recently visited the West Coast of the United States to consolidate our understanding and refine our approach to digital transformation,” the bank’s chairperson, David Gonski, said in a statement. – BusinessNewsAsia.com