UK options for NAB

National Australia Bank yesterday confirmed that it was in talks with others in the banking market in Britain over options for consolidation of NAB's businesses in that market.

That this must be so has been obvious since NAB previewed its options at a strategy day for investors in March 2009, in which the main message was that the bank was neither a buyer of other banks nor a seller of its Clydesdale Bank subsidiary in Britain. The bank later indicated that it was open to buying banks in Britain, with NAB linked to several building societies rather than banks.

More recently, a timetable-forced divestiture of select assets of Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB - required by Britain's government at the insistence of the European Union - has expanded NAB's options.

"We have been approached by a number of players in the UK market to see how we could work with them to participate in that consolidation," the bank's chief executive, Cameron Clyne, told shareholders at the group's annual meeting in Brisbane.

"We are going to explore and assess what value these approaches offer for NAB shareholders," he said.

A sale of the banks may now be viable and would help replenish capital being allocated to wealth management in Australia.

However, prospective buyers of those assets are likely to include private equity investors as well as other banks. Private equity buyers may prefer to (or even have to) buy banks in consortium with an existing bank such as NAB.