Briefs: Westpac sub notes sell well, card surcharge rules clarified, and more 24 August 2012 4:28PM Briefs, Westpac says it has sold A$1.68 billion in subordinated notes in a subordinated note offer. This is more than three times the amount of capital it said it was seeking to sell when it announced the offer five weeks ago. The Payments System Board published a revised, and more prescriptive, guideline yesterday that will inform the application of the new caps on credit card surcharges next year. Merchants that choose to surcharge credit card payments must limit the surcharge to the actual fees imposed by their banks, as well are some narrowly defined additional costs. The latter includes the cost of fraud and charge-backs, and some IT costs. The commercial equipment finance business of Thorn Group is now writing A$3 million in new business a month, the firm's managing director, John Hughes, told the AGM yesterday. This is a 10-fold increase on a year ago in what is a new business line for the group. Heritage Bank says it will guarantee the yield on a retirement savings account with the bank. Heritage said the guaranteed yield would be 0.5 percentage points more than the RBA cash rate. This puts the Heritage rate on an RSA (of 4.0 per cent) in the middle of the range of rates offered for this little used class of bank account (as monitored by Infochoice). The Barry Plant real estate network is entering the mortgage broking business. The firm said it had engaged Paul Gollan, from consulting firm Loan Broker, to set up the new service. Gollan founded Australian Mortgage Brokers but left earlier this year. In 1994 Gollan helped set up a similar business for Ray White, which now trades as Loan Market. Barry Plant will use the Australian Finance Group as the aggregator.