Customer-owned banking in Australia: from credit union to mutual bank

Since the 1990s financial sector regulation in Australia has treated credit unions and building societies the same as banks under the designated title of authorized depository institutions. This allows credit unions to choose between different organizational structures: cooperative; convert to customer-owned banks or to demutualize. This article utilizes semi-structured interviews to analyse the key motivations for organizational change. It examines a number of credit unions and their conversion experience to customer-owned banks. It finds that adaptation of the credit union model was necessary to change customer perceptions, ensure future growth in the customer base and assets, and facilitate access to capital raisings with the credit rating of a bank. Despite this change customer-owned banks retain the core principals of mutuality.

Modeling of shear ductile fracture considering a changeable cut-off value for stress triaxiality

 A macroscopic ductile fracture criterion is proposed based on micro-mechanism analysis of nucleation, growth and shear coalescence of voids from experimental observation of fracture surfaces. The proposed ductile fracture model endows a changeable cut-off value for the stress triaxiality to represent effect of micro-structures, the Lode parameter, temperature, and strain rate on ductility of metals. The proposed model is used to construct fracture loci of AA 2024- T351. The constructed fracture loci are compared with experimental data covering wide stress triaxiality ranging between –0.5 and 1.0. The comparison suggests that the proposed model can provide a satisfactory prediction of ductile fracture for metals from compressive upsetting tests to plane strain tension with slanted fracture surfaces. Moreover, it is expected that the proposed model reasonably describes ductile fracture behavior in high velocity perforation simulation since a reasonable cut-off value for the stress triaxiality is coupled with the proposed ductile fracture criterion.

Ownership structure, corporate governance and bank performance: Evidence from gcc countries

The paper examines the effect of ownership structure and board characteristics on bank performance of GCC counties. Evidence indicates that the extent of the foreign ownership level has a significant positive association with the bank performance. However, concentrated ownership does appear to have a significant negative impact on performance and institutional ownership does not have any significant effect on performance. Other governance variables such as CEO duality and board size appear insignificant impact on performance. These results suggest a need to strengthen the internal control mechanisms within banks of GCC countries.

Does banks’ dual holding affect bank lending and firms’ investment decisions? Evidence from China

This study investigates the effect of banks’ dual holding on bank lending and firms’ investment decisions using a sample of listed firms in China. We find that dual holding leads to easier access to bank loans, a result that is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) than SOEs. We also find that dual holding distorts banks’ lending decisions and harms the investment efficiency for SOEs, while resulting in optimal lending decisions and enhanced investment efficiency for non-SOEs. For non-SOEs, further analysis suggests that optimal lending decisions and efficient investment can be achieved for firms with higher ownership concentration, and firms in which the family and foreign investors are the controlling shareholders. We argue that, in emerging markets, whether a bank plays a monitoring role by directly holding the debt and equity claims of companies relies heavily on whether the potential collusion between firm executives and bank managers can be averted, which in turn is determined by the firms’ governance framework and ownership structure.

The relevance of Asian development bank: existing in the shadow of the Asian infrastructure investment bank

This paper analyses the potential impact of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) on the Japan-USA-led Asian Development Bank (ADB). Given the financial strengths and the technical know-how of the newly formed AIIB there is a question about thefuture role and indeed relevance of the ADB. The questions canvassed in this article refer to ADB’s ability to change and adapt to the new situation, where it is no longer the dominant multi-lateral development bank (MDB) in the Asia-Pacific region. Against this background the discussion turns to issues concerning the geo-political sphere of influence of the ADB andAIIB and analyses the ADB – AIIB geo-political equilibrium in the Asia-Pacific region. Subsequently this paper discusses factors that may impact on ADB’s future relevance.

Herding behaviour in the Australian loan market and its impact on bank loan quality

We examine the effect of herding behaviour on the credit quality of bank loans in Australia. We find that bank herding varies with different types of loans. It tends to be more prevalent in owner-occupied housing loans and credit cards than other types of loans. During the global financial crisis period, herding in owner-occupied housing loans was most pronounced due to the flight-to-quality phenomenon in the housing sector. Furthermore, we find that the big four banks tend to herd more than smaller and regional banks. Bank herding behaviour is countercyclical, as it is negatively related to real GDP growth and the cost of funding but is positively related to market risk. Regulatory capital requirements may also encourage herding as banks are required to hold less risk-weighted capital for residential loans. Most importantly, bank herding is related to higher impaired assets and therefore lower loan quality. Our findings may have implications for policymakers and bank regulators.

Learning feature trajectories using Gabor Filter Bank for human activity segmentation and recognition

We describe a novel method for human activity segmentation and interpretation in surveillance applications based on Gabor filter-bank features. A complex human activity is modeled as a sequence of elementary human actions like walking, running, jogging, boxing, hand-waving etc. Since human silhouette can be modeled by a set of rectangles, the elementary human actions can be modeled as a sequence of a set of rectangles with different orientations and scales. The activity segmentation is based on Gabor filter-bank features and normalized spectral clustering. The feature trajectories of an action category are learnt from training example videos using Dynamic Time Warping. The combined segmentation and the recognition processes are very efficient as both the algorithms share the same framework and Gabor features computed for the former can be used for the later. We have also proposed a simple shadow detection technique to extract good silhouette which is necessary for good accuracy of an action recognition technique. © 2008 IEEE.