Briefs: IMB Bank under starter's orders, AFG-Prospa lending deal, iCash shareholders vote for merger 31 July 2015 4:02PM Banking Day staff Briefs, IMB, which received approval to become a mutual bank last month, will begin trading under the name IMB Bank tomorrow (Saturday). IMB has around 180,000 members and A$5 billion of assets. It will not change its ownership structure or business model. IMB chairman Michael Cole has said previously that the change would help the institution market to young people, who don't know what a building society does. Shareholders of ATM supplier and fleet operator iCash Payment Systems have voted in favour of a merger with ATM fleet operator Stargroup Ltd. The transaction includes the issue of 157 million iCash shares to Stargroup shareholders (at A$0.035 a share), as well as a complicated round of share swaps and capital raisings. The merged business, which will have a combined fleet of 100 ATMs, will be called Stargroup. Australia's largest mortgage broker, Australian Finance Group, has added online business lender Prospa to its lending panel. AFG managing director Brett McKeon said the company would promote Prospa's unsecured small business loans through its 2,300 strong broker network, noting this was in line with the firm's nominated growth strategy of expanding its lending product opportunities, ahead of its listing earlier this year. According to Beau Bertoli, joint CEO of Prospa, the firm has lent A$60 million over the past two years. AFG has a loan book in excess of $100 billion. ASIC chairman Greg Medcraft has paved the way for a crackdown on lending standards at major Australian lenders, The Australian reports. Medcraft, speaking at an international policy summit in Sydney, said the corporate regulator's probe into the underwriting standards of a sample of 11 financial institutions had uncovered unacceptable practices and will be publishing these results next month. The merger between Teachers Mutual Bank and Unicredit will take effect tomorrow (Saturday). The merger, which was announced in January, brings together a Sydney-based mutual bank with 160,000 members and A$4.7 billion of assets, and a Perth-based credit union specialising in the tertiary education sector and with 7500 members and $200 million of assets. The merger parties wanted to retain both brands and Unicredit, now part of a mutual bank, will trade as UniBank. Commonwealth Bank's ASB has launched apps for both Apple and Android smartwatches, which it said made it the first New Zealand bank to allow customers to make transfers on such devices. ASB said customers with either type of smartwatch could use the new app to check their account balances and transfer balances between accounts on their watch. ASB also announced it has enabled fingerprint scanning for logging into the ASB mobile banking app on supported iOS devices. New Zealand's Heartland Bank, which lends to farmers and car buyers and to pensioners through reverse mortgages, reported annual profit for the just completed year to June 30 would be at the upper end of its previously indicated range of NZ$46 million to NZ$48 million. It forecast net profit for the current 2015/16 financial year of NZ$51 million to NZ$55 million and it reassured investors that dairy exposures were less than eight per cent of its loans and had an average loan to value ratio of 61 per cent. Heartland's shares rose 4.4 per cent to NZ$1.19.