Australian lender Westpac's annual profit falls 2%

(Reuters) -Australia's Westpac Banking Corp reported a 2% fall in annual profit on Monday, hurt by higher costs due to one-off restructuring charges and by emerging margin pressures from competition in lending and deposits. The country's third-largest lender by market value reported net profit after tax of A$6.99 billion ($4.54 billion) for the year ended September 30, compared with A$7.11 billion a year earlier and a Visible Alpha consensus estimate of A$6.83 billion. ($1 = 1.5389 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Roushni Nair and Shivangi Lahiri in Bengaluru; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

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