HBOS Australia's aspirations for the business banking market in Australia are pretty daunting, with the bank hoping to emulate the achievements of HBOS in Britain, which secured one fifth of the UK banking market.Business banking chief executive Paul Clark told the Australian: "I do think (a 20 per cent market share in business lending is) achievable. We can do a lot of things to accelerate market share growth, but in the end it all depends on execution."Bank of Western Australia, the primary HBOSA brand in Australia, accounted for 3.97 per cent of lending by APRA-registered banks to non-financial businesses at January 2006. According to the APRA data, BankWest had $10.5 billion in business loans.The published accounts for HBOS, however, for the December 2005 year show the bank had business lending assets in Australia of $8.8 billion. This figure presumably includes lending by Capital and BOS International, two business financing subsidiaries of HBOS whose loans may not be captured by the monthly APRA series. Dividing this lower HBOSA measure by the Reserve Bank of Australia measure of credit advanced by all lenders to business, the HBOS market share in Australia may be as low as 1.8 per cent.Clark told the newspaper that HBOSA hired 40 more specialist business lenders in January and February. He said better than expected trading in December resulted in plans being brought forward.This may mean that HBOSA will quickly exceed one goal, articulated in December 2005, to hire 50 more business bankers over the course of 2006.Meanwhile HBOS Australia's investment and insurance managing director John Van Der Wielen told Money Management that the St Andrews financial planning, insurance and investment arm of the bank contributed about two per cent of profit in Australia.He said that the subsidiary doubled profit to $10.8 million in 2005, up from $5 million in 2004. He said he expected to double the profit again in 2006.Van Der Wielen told the newspaper that most of the profits were due to life insurance sales.