Where to now for big four banks?
Morningstar's senior banks analyst David Ellis explains why he has cut his fair value estimates for the major Australian banks, even as they remain undervalued, and why Westpac navigated the royal commission “least-worst”.
Mentioned: ANZ Group Holdings Ltd (ANZ), Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), National Australia Bank Ltd (NAB), Westpac Banking Corp (WBC)
David Ellis: Yes, I did cut the fair values for all four major banks by between 3 per cent to 6 per cent each, mainly to do with what we think increasing headwinds or tougher operating conditions ahead for the major banks. But it's not a major change. It's just some fine-tuning on the edges.
Looking at the actual results for the three of the four major banks reported full year results; I think the best thing to say about them that there was no new nasty surprises. Everything was pretty much as expected. Some of the clear highlights were moderating or soft lending growth.
So, home loan lending growth is slowly easing and is expected to decline further over the next couple of years. Net interest margins were under pressure from funding costs, higher funding costs, and increased competition. But three of the four major banks repriced their variable home loan rates in later August or September which will flow through into the start of the new financial year. So, that should go a long way to restoring the net interest margins for the major banks.
Growth disappointed. It was higher, mainly to do with compliance and regulatory and customer remediation costs that each of the four major banks made provisions for in the last month or so.
I suppose one of the highlights was capital. Capital was strong and hence dividends – there was no change in dividends. So, there was no cut to the dividends. Payout ratios are high, possibly unsustainably high. But in this current benign environment, strong economic growth, very low credit growth, very low bad debts, the banks can afford to pay these high payout ratios. So, I don't expect dividends to be cut in the near term and maybe even there will be modest increases during 2019 on the dividends.
Westpac is still the preferred based on valuation. So, even though we cut the fair value, it's still trading around about 18 per cent below our fair value. One of the key reasons we like Westpac is the fact that we believe it hasn't got the distractions that the other three major banks has. It's not trying to sell major parts of its business. It's not demerging its wealth businesses. It doesn't have senior management changes to deal with. Whilst it is, of course, facing issues from the Royal Commission, I think it managed to navigate through the Royal Commission the best or the least worst, the least worst of the major banks. So, the underlying business is going along well. We expect to see improvements in operating efficiencies, a lower cost to income ratio and better net interest margins going forward.