HSBC Bank Australia has reached the end of a close to two-year process of refining its portfolio of businesses in Australia, with the sale of the broker-sourced component of its home loan book to mortgage manager FirstMac.The bank will cease to deal with mortgage brokers from early 2007. HSBC said on Friday that it had sold a home loan portfolio with a book value of $2.3 billion to FirstMac. The portfolio represents more than 10,000 customer relationships, HSBC said. The home loans sold represent 39 per cent of HSBC's home loan portfolio at October 2006, based on data published by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.Stuart Davis, managing director of HSBC, said the broker-sourced mortgage business "got to a stage where we invested more in that channel or invested more in our own channel."He said of the decision to sell, "Part of it comes down to what is your business model. Ours is very much a relationship driven one. We found it very hard to cross sell to this customer base. And when you can't cross sell, it means the period of your relationship tends to be shorter."We find that mortgages originated through direct means or through the branch network tend to stay a lot longer than [loans sold] through the broker network. We put that down to cross sell."Davis said the ratio of cross sale of additional HSBC products (such as credit cards, margin loans and insurance) was about double for loans sold through the bank's own networks.HSBC has in the last two years sold three businesses, with the recent sale of stock broking to E*Trade and margin lending to St George. HSBC sold its asset management business to Challenger Financial Services in early 2005. This year, however, the bank bought the sub-custody business unit from Westpac.Of these sales, and one acquisition, Davis said on Friday: "We've finished in terms of what we needed to do. Our strategy has not changed. Our strategy is to focus on areas of comparative advantage. "You saw that in terms of our purchase of the Westpac custody business. We invested $150 million in buying that business, and it fits nicely into that sweet spot of comparative advantage."We are still just as strong in the retail market, in credit cards and deposit accounts."HSBC is also pouring resources into its point-of-sale consumer finance business, where the bank markets hire-purchase style loans to buyers of consumer durables.