Westpac considers its options in NZ

Westpac today (24 March 2021) announced that it is “… assessing the appropriate structure for its New Zealand business and whether a demerger would be in the best interests of shareholders. Westpac is in the very early stage of this assessment and no decisions have been made.”

There are obviously a lot of moving parts here but one important consideration is the interaction between the substantial increase in capital requirements mandated by the RBNZ and APRA’s proposed change in the way that these investments must be funded by the Australian parent.

The rest of this post offers a short summary of how these investments are currently treated under the Australian capital adequacy standard (APS 111) and APRA’s proposed changes.

As a rule, APRA’s general capital treatment of equity exposures requires that they be fully deducted from CET1 Capital in order to avoid double counting of capital. The existing rules (APS 111) however provides a long-standing variation to this general rule when measuring Level 1 capital adequacy. This variation allows an ADI at Level 1 to risk weight (after first deducting any intangibles component) its equity investments in banking and insurance subsidiaries. The risk weight is 300 percent if the subsidiary is listed or 400 per cent if it is unlisted.

APRA recognises that this improves the L1 ratios by around 100bp versus what would be the case if a full CET1 deduction were applied but was comfortable with that outcome based on exposure levels that preceded the RBNZ change in policy.

The RBNZ’s move towards higher CET1 requirements however undermines this status quo and potentially sees a greater share of the overall pool of equity in the group migrate from Australia to NZ. APRA recognises of course that the RBNZ can do whatever it deems best for NZ depositors but APRA equally has to ensure that the NZ benefits do not come at the expense of Australian depositors (and other creditors).

To address this issue, APRA has proposed to amend APS 111 to limit the extent to which an ADI may use debt to fund investments in banking and insurance subsidiaries.

• ADIs, at Level 1, will be required to deduct these equity investments from CET1 Capital, but only to the extent the investment in the subsidiary is in excess of 10 per cent of CET1 Capital.
• An ADI may risk weight the investment, after deduction of any intangibles component, at 250 per cent to the extent the investment is below this 10 per cent threshold.
• The amount of the exposure that is risk weighted would be included as part of the related party limits detailed in the recently finalised APS 222.

As APRA is more concerned about large concentrated exposures, it proposed to limit the amount of the exposure to an individual subsidiary that can be leveraged to 10 per cent of an ADI’s CET1 Capital. This means capital requirements are increasing for large concentrated exposures, as amounts over the 10 per cent threshold would be required to be met dollar-for-dollar by the ADI parent company.

You can find my original post here which offers more background and may be useful if you are not familiar with the technicalities of Level 1 and Level 2 capital adequacy. At the time the change was proposed, APRA indicated that it would release more detail during 2020 with the aim of implementing the change on 1 January 2021. Covid 19 obviously derailed that original timeline but I assume APRA will provide an update sometime soon.

Tony – From the Outside