ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott: The signs of an economic recovery are promising

Outgoing banking boss Shayne Elliott says we may have passed the worst but risks remain in the outlook.

ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott Photograph: Arsineh Houspian.

CEO SURVEY 2025: FULL COVERAGE

Economy

How would you rate the momentum of the Australian economy as we head into

2025?

Globally this year the world passed through the most sustained cycle of higher interest rates in decades. Deep recessions haven’t been apparent, but cost of living challenges have persisted and many businesses have faced higher input costs.

Looking ahead into 2025, I would rate our economic momentum as mildly stronger than the year just gone. The main improvement we are starting to see is a pick-up in consumption after a period of weakness, which is promising.

But while the inflationary pressures have moderated and central banks have largely paused interest rate tightening, considerable uncertainty remains and we know many of our customers are feeling the impacts. Against this backdrop, ANZ is well prepared with high levels of capital, liquidity and funding which allows us to help those customers in need.

Official forecasts have Australia trimming interest rates from the first half of calendar 2025, is that consistent with your view?

Yes. Interest rates are now declining in some jurisdictions, including New Zealand, and Australia is likely to follow in 2025. We have recently shifted to a May start to the easing cycle given the slow decline in core inflation, the RBA’s apparent desire to be more confident that inflation is returning to the target band, and early signs of a pick-up in activity.

What are you seeing around inflation in your own business?

Our two main costs are our people and technology. At the margin, labour availability has improved but technology costs are still rising appreciably. However, as we said at our results, if you look forward for the next year or so, we’ll probably see some moderation of inflation.

Outlook

What excites you heading into 2025?

Obviously I’ll be handing over the reins of ANZ to new CEO Nuno Matos next July, but in the meantime I’ll be focused on continuing to deliver our strategy to support our customers, our shareholders and our people.

We’re heading into the new year on the back of the successful acquisition of Suncorp Bank, which is already delivering beyond our expectations, so I’m excited about the opportunities ahead as we continue to integrate. I’m also looking forward to continuing our migration from an ageing set of systems and processes to a contemporary dual platform business, centred around ANZ Plus for the retail bank and ANZ Transactive Global for our institutional and commercial customers.

Reform

As we move into an election year, in your mind, what’s the single biggest lever that can/should be used to lift Australia’s competitiveness or productivity?

I fear that when we talk “productivity”, the public hears “work me harder and pay me less”. We need to change the language to how we can give people better tools (like AI) to help them get more done in their day.

Geopolitics

Will a Donald Trump presidency have a potential impact on your business or sector (tariffs or streamlined regulation)?

Overall we are looking into a world of change – changing tariffs, changing taxes, changing policies and priorities. Change is good for banks like ANZ because we exist to finance and facilitate change – change in where people invest, who they trade with, how they operate. Policymaking in the US has important implications for the geopolitical environment and all global organisations. For ANZ, any increase in US tariffs could prompt businesses to reroute trade, creating new trading patterns that will need to be adapted to. Changes to US industrial policy settings, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, may also present both challenges and opportunities for ANZ and is something we monitor closely.

Does geopolitics drive a bigger part of your decision-making?

We have been in the geopolitics business since the day we were founded in Van Diemen’s Land in 1828 to now, as we span 29 markets. We have navigated wars, famine, natural disaster, revolutions in technology, creation of new nation states, trade wars and more.

Understanding the world around us, sensing change and being flexible enough to move capital to support customers in a fast-changing environment is what we do.

People

Has your organisation’s approach to flexible working – including working from home – evolved during the year. Is this likely to change further into 2025?

Over the years we have evolved our flexibility policies and we will continue to do so as needed. Under our current policy we expect people in our home markets who can work flexibly to spend a minimum of 50 per cent of their scheduled work time in the workplace, on average over a month. We accept that people can work from home as needed and I think our current policy gets the balance right – it’s not a binary choice and neither is it set and forget.

The way people work is constantly changing. We just experienced a step change due to a pandemic, but it’s not going back to the way it was. It never does. It’s no different when corporates needed to employ women when men went off to war.

That crisis saw a revolution in working women which benefited all, but we didn’t go back once the men came home. We continued to adapt.

Technology

Where is your organisation along the AI journey – is it in the developmental stage, or are you now using the technology at scale across your business?

In 2023 we developed our understanding of AI with a number of proof-of-concepts, and in 2024 we turned our attention to proof-of-value. We asked our teams to start defining opportunities that had real, tangible value for our shareholders and our customers.  

We still, though, have been moving cautiously, particularly in areas that are novel and as-yet-unproven.   We’ve been testing ideas with real customers and with real data – but on a small scale before making substantial investments.    

Some of these have worked out really well, and we’re moving at pace. This includes testing the efficiency gains for our software engineers at ANZ – over 3,000 of them – using a programming co-pilot. We found that they could get some tasks done up to twice as fast.

We then became the first bank in the region to roll out GitHub Copilot at scale for all of our software development teams. We’re starting to see measurable increases in speed, quality and volume.

We also tested desktop productivity tools with Microsoft Copilot that all of our people can now use to search for information, help draft content and review documents. That’s working really well as we have more and more of our people using these tools.

We continue to look at a range of areas across the bank, from evaluating climate change risk through to improving the efficiency of our people in our sales teams. There’s a range of concepts that show the real power of AI to help us deliver better value.

But AI is just the next stage in technology – just like web, mobile and cloud before it. In each new phase, we all get over excited and go through trials and experimentation.

Successful firms work out where the new tools can solve real customer problems and never look back. I am sure AI will transform banking for the benefit of customers and it’s an exciting journey to embark on.

Are the benefits matching the promise?

We are seeing a range of benefits – some tangible, and some intangible. For example, we see teams saving minutes or hours on some common tasks. Now, of course those benefits can be used in various ways – people are freed up to do more things, or the task is done with less impediments leading to a higher quality.

Of course, not everything is successful. We’ve found that for some use cases, the value is harder to get. We’re trying a range of novel ideas and if they all worked, then clearly we haven’t been trying hard enough. So our teams are pushing hard on the gen-AI promise and sometimes it doesn’t work out, in which case we learn from it and move on.