Comment: West-Pac a regional flop

Anyone remember one rationale for the choice of name upon the rebranding of Bank of New South Wales back in 1982?

Something to do with a western Pacific focus for the bank, supposedly.

If ever there was a strategic rationale for the bank's collection of investments in the mostly down at heel island economies of the Pacific, Westpac never showed what this might be.

A few top up investments in the 1980s petered out in 1990 with the purchase of assets of French bank Indosuez.

From later this year Westpac's Pacific business will be confined to Fiji and Papua New Guinea, the latter two retained no doubt because of the bank's links to mining companies in those two countries.

This leaves BRED, another French bank, and Bank of Baroda as latter day offshore believers in the profits to be made from serving a slice of the world's population still regarded as underbanked and, until the advent of mobile banking started to fix things, financially excluded.