The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission has approved the sale of Commonwealth Bank’s 37.5 per cent stake in BoCommLife to MS&AD Insurance Group, the parent of Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance.

The sale is expected to be completed by the end of the year, with proceeds of around A$886 million.

The BoCommLife sale comes at the end of a busy couple of years for the team running the bank’s divestment program.

Earlier in the year, the bank received regulatory approval to sell its 80 per cent interest in Indonesian life insurance company PT Commonwealth Life to PT FWD Life Indonesia. The transaction was completed in June.

CBA still owns an Indonesian banking business, PT Bank Commonwealth, which will enter into a 15-year distribution partnership with the FWD Group for the provision of life insurance products.

CBA sold Count Financial to CountPlus and Colonial First State Global Asset Management to Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corp.

It sold part of its CommSec business, wholesale broker Ausiex which trades as CommSec Adviser Services, to Nomura Research Institute for $85 million.

The bank said the CommSec retail broking business remains core to its strategy and will be retained.

And it moved closer to finalisation of the CommInsure Life sale to AIA Group, reporting in September that it had received part-payment of around $450 million. That leaves just $100 million to pay on the $2.3 billion acquisition, which is expected to be paid via an asset transfer in the June half next year.

Yesterday the bank said the increase in after-tax earnings from divestments in the December half would be around $840 million, which would be recognised as a non-cash item.

The capital impact of the divestments would be a 29 basis point increase in the bank’s common equity tier 1 capital ratio.