The chief executive of parent Combined Building Society, Jeff Greenslade, was in Dunedin yesterday to update broking houses Craigs Investment Partners and Forsyth Barr on the strategic plans of recently listed Building Society Holdings; the vehicle for the proposed Heartland bank.
At present, 28% of the shares in newly listed Building Society Holdings are trading on the New Zealand Stock Exchange and the remaining 72% are held by Pyne Gould Corp, whose subsidiary Marac Finance merged with the Southern Cross Building Society and CBS Canterbury on January 7.
Pyne Gould, which was to have sold a portion of its Building Society shares to institutions to raise cash for a loan elsewhere, will instead distribute all the 72% of the shares to its shareholders, so long as Agria's partial takeover of PGG Wrightson goes ahead, Mr Greenslade said yesterday.
Mr Greenslade is confident "more than 70%" of future funds will come from retail deposits.
The non-bank finance companies had handled about $18 billion of funds before recent collapses, so there was no shortage of domestic funding available.
Mr Greenslade said a prospectus would have to be released to Pyne shareholders to receive the 72% of shares and High Court approval sought. He had no expectations of a timeframe involved with applying to the Reserve Bank to become a registered bank.
He said there was no intention to raise further capital through an issue, saying Pyne would have some unspecified amount of cash available for future acquisitions, such as some of South Canterbury Finance's "good bank" assets or even a possible purchase of PGG-Wrightson assets.
