Bank of Queensland continues to scratch around for takeover and merger options, and in the meantime continues to pump out the rhetoric over how the effort to generate actual options is going.In a presentation to the UBS Financial Services Conference in Sydney yesterday David Liddy, the managing director, outlined some concepts to inform investment priorities over the near term.Aspects of Liddy's pitch were familiar from the first (and subsequent) public discussion of "Project Pathways" in December 2008.These include incremental takeovers of niche deposit-taking institutions such as credit unions, not that many are likely to end up on the market.This option, in the BOQ management and board vision, would deliver efficiency ratios that match those of the major banks, produce asset and deposit growth of between 1.5 and two times system growth and also produce a return on equity in the "mid teens".Other aspects are newer.Liddy yesterday referred in a couple of presentation slides to "transformational consolidation opportunities" and "transformational change".Under this option the BOQ brass and their advisers Palladio Partners imagine, in the words used in the presentation slides, that they might "sling shot past the majors on efficiency".Somehow BOQ aims to be a "scale player". The upper bound of the system growth generated by the hoped for business model would be 2.5 times.The aspiration for the ROE then is in the "high teens", consistent with recent returns of major banks but below returns achieved by those banks during the later years of Australia's recent credit boom.There's a lot of hope and little tangible reality to BOQ's talk of transformation.Completed "benefits" disclosed by Liddy of work to date were $50 million, annualised.Two works in progress planned to produce gains are "simplification" and "sourcing review and opportunities".