Adelaide Bank brand in the shadows

There's some more, though not much, detail on the plans the management teams of Bendigo and Adelaide banks have to integrate the two businesses in the scheme booklet published by Adelaide Bank late on Friday.

The two banks plan to merge their companies under an agreement announced in early August. The banks expect to merge as a legal entity from early December, with integration tasks expected to take two years or so.

The new bank will be known as Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and will be formally headquartered in Bendigo.

The scheme booklet, published by Adelaide Bank in connection with a special meeting of shareholders to vote on the merger, says that the Adelaide Bank brand will represent the wholesale business of the merged entity and with that business headquartered in Adelaide.

The retail business of the merged bank will be headquartered in Bendigo and be primarily represented by the Bendigo Bank brand.

While the booklet does not say so explicitly the Adelaide Bank brand will obviously continue in South Australian markets.

The booklet says the community bank model - the network of franchised branches that is the source of branch expansion for Bendigo Bank - "will continue to be a focus of the retail growth strategy under the merged group" while the group "will have a greater capacity to invest further in the South Australian branch network."

The merged group "will focus on customer acquisition and partnering" according to Adelaide Bank, and will combine four main business segments: Retail Banking, Wealth Management, Business Partners and Wholesale Mortgages.

The scheme booklet includes an organisation chart, of sorts, that includes the heading "Customer acquisition", and lists under that retail banking and then lists five business divisions under that: retail branches, community bank branches, business banking, financial planning and "solutions".

Then there's a "Partnering" segment which includes three further groups: wealth management (including margin lending and funds management and may include the white-labelled deposit activity of Adelaide Bank); business partners, which includes the portfolio funding division (a lot of which is business lending); and wholesale mortgages.

One editing problem in the booklet could have underlying significance. There's a letter from Robert Johanson, chair of Bendigo Bank, to shareholders of Adelaide Bank which, among other things, states that Adelaide "excels in partnering with a range of distribution partners (such as mortgage brokers)".

Adelaide don't much deal with mortgage brokers any more (since the business was barely profitable) and instead are concentrating on a few dozen relationships with mortgage managers, which isn't the same thing.