Danny Pavisic, CEO, Unity Bank
Fresh from the completion, last Friday, of its merger with G&C Mutual Bank, Unity Bank is scouting around for smaller mutual ADIs to further bolster its scale.
At a combined $3.8 billion in assets, the merger provides even greater opportunity to continue the strong growth of the organisations, with both having tracked well above system growth in recent years.
This is around 14 per cent on each side, and neither Unity nor G&C have sourced new business through mortgage brokers.
The merged entity is known as G&C Mutual Bank Limited immediately following the merger, changing to Unity Bank Limited from 1 July 2025.
The G&C Mutual Bank, Unity Bank and Reliance Bank brands will be retained and consolidated into a single Unity Bank brand over the next 12 months.
Unity is relying on natural attrition in staff to progressively control costs, a domain – on the G&C side in particular – for which the bank was renowned. G&C most recently reported a cost to income ratio of 56 per cent.
In the year ahead, the C/I ratio is likely to be in the 60s, Unity Bank CEO Danny Pavisic said yesterday.
Rosanna Argall, the outgoing G&C Mutual Bank CEO is deputy CEO of the new bank and will replace Pavisic in a year’s time.
Pavisic will then remain with the bank, he told Banking Day in a joint interview yesterday.
New roles have been found in areas of duplication.
“Areas like risk and IT, it’s such an evolving area, there’s always new roles” Pavisic said.
For example, G&C’s chief risk officer is now head of operational risk and compliance.
“Every time someone leaves there will be an evaluation whether we need the role” Argall said.
The integration last week of the two bank’s common systems was “the largest Ultradata consolidation they’ve ever done” Argall said.
All other systems, bar Treasury, were already common to the two banks.
“We’ve been very successful in doing the basics very well. We’ve got fantastic growth coming through” Pavisic said.
“We don’t want to be the bank for all Australians. There are elements of the market we are good at.”
Unity Bank may have this merger to bed down, but the bank will be alert to further mergers.
“We want to be there, there’s got to be value alignment” Argall said.