IOOF Holdings Analysis, page-11

"Your take on these developments @madamswer?"

I am a notoriously slow thinker; it normally takes me days of navel gazing for me to be able to distil in my mind's eye, developments such as this.

My first pass response is to say that IOOF appears to be catching a bit of AMP-itis contagion.
Yet there is a huge cultural difference between IOOF andAGL... one company is a gigantic, multi-headed hydra where the one head doesn't know what the other heads are doing, and the other is a smaller, more nimble whippet with a flat organisational structure in which the managers know what is happening in almost all of the corners, nooks and crannies.

Also, it has already gone through this sort of hellfire and brimstone in a Senate Inquiry, chaired by the then-animated, but now-discredited Sam Dastyari.
And that damp squib of an event turned out to be a great buying opportunity.


But I also have enough grey hair to know that when the market encounters this sort of uncertainty - even if it is only transient - it tends to shoot first and ask questions later.
Which - true to form - is what it is doing.


So, to pre-empt your next possible question: I fully expect this Commission to present itself as a buying opportunity in coming weeks. But I also fully doubt that it will result in any permanent damage to IOOF's fundamental business model, nor to the value of the company.

While my lazy eye has wandered off to the front pages of the newspapers to read about the short-term machinations of the Royal Commission, my good eye remains fixed firmly on the big prize, namely the integration of the ANZ business.