Have you seen the Bank Ownership Tree?

One Response to Have you seen the Bank Ownership Tree?

1. Gordon says:

   May 3, 2012 at 12:46 am

   I have been trying to do some (very) rough calculations on who owns what. The Nominee holdings of the big banks are hard to make sense of and it can be argued that it is the underlying share holders of these Nominee accounts that actually own the stock, not the bank who simply run the Nominee service on behalf of its investment customers.

   The bank argument for withholding interest rate drops from customer has always been that it is preserving the profits for its shareholders, and very laudable this is too Still, it got me wondering about the overlap between the shareholders and the bank customers. More specifically, the Super Fund holdings of the major banks.

   As everyone who is or has been in work should have a Super Fund, and given that the default balanced Super Fund contains about 50% Oz shares, it seemed likely that the big bangs would make up a healthy portion of this.

   Anyway, here are my rough initial calculations based on some very big assumption. Happy for any correction of errors or comments! I have taken the CBA as the example.

   CBA Market Cap $83,000,000,000
   Total Super Funds Under Management (Oz) $1,800,000,000,000
   All Ords Market Cap $1,200,000,000,000
   Big Assumptions here:-
   Balanced Fund % of Oz Equities 50
   CBA Market Cap as % of All Ords MC 7
   All Ords held in Super Funds (50% of total Super FUM) $900,000,000,000
   CBA Portion held in Super Funds (7% of Super Funds Equity holiding) $63,000,000,000
   %of CBA held by Super Funds 76

   So, 76% of the CBA is held by the Super Funds. Seems a bit high, but the point is that *WE* are the shareholders *AND* the customer. A 10% dividend on our Super share holdings is worth very little compared to a 0.5% drop on our Mortgage! Surely as majority shareholders we should be able to influence their commercial decision making

   Gordon

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