Briefs: NZ lending accelerates, new Rural Bank MD, HSBC appoints M&A head, mobile banking to trigger 03 August 2015 3:50PM Banking Day staff Briefs, Bank lending to New Zealand farmers accelerated in June as loss-making dairy farmers racked up bigger overdrafts, Reserve Bank of New Zealand figures showed. Farm lending in June rose NZ$897 million from May to NZ$56.971 billion and was up 7.6 per cent from June 2014, which was the fastest annual growth rate since December 2009. Household lending rose by NZ$1.172 billion to NZ$218.726 billion in June from May and its annual growth rate of 5.6 per cent was its fastest rate since March 2014. Seasonally adjusted household lending growth for the month of 0.6 per cent was the fastest growth since December 2008 as falling interest rates and a housing boom in Auckland lifted lending. Bendigo and Adelaide Bank subsidiary Rural Bank has appointed Alexandra Gartmann as its managing director. Since 2011 Gartmann has led the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal and for ten years before that she was chief executive of Birchip Cropping Group, a community-based agricultural organisation. She is chair of the CSIRO Agriculture Flagship Advisory Council and a member of the Prime Minister's Community Business partnership. She will take up her role at Rural Bank in October. HSBC Bank Australia has appointed Scott Couzner as its head of mergers and acquisitions in Australia. Couzner is moving across from UBS, where he was most recently head of M&A for South East Asia. He will work with HSBC's corporate and institutional banking team. UBS analysts and KPMG surveyed bank managers around the world on the impact of mobile banking and found they are expecting the rapid growth of the service to result in a reduction in branch numbers of more than five per cent, Fairfax Media reports. They also expect mobile banking to contribute to significant cost savings. In Australia respondents said they expected branch closures to be around 11 per cent - about 600 branches.