Carnegie’s exit is unsurprising, and will be the first of several expected to leave ANZ in coming months with Matos, a former top HSBC banker, determined to lift the perennial number four bank.
Other areas in Portuguese banker Matos’ sights that can expect change will be risk management, institutional banking and technology. Those who have worked with Matos in previous roles say the global bank executive has a reputation for moving quick and will leave no doubt he is now calling the shots.
Management upheaval is always expected to follow with the appointment of an outside boss like Matos. But ANZ’s reputational hits of the past year and relative underperformance gives Matos even more of a mandate for change.
A former Google Australia boss, Carnegie has been with ANZ since 2016, initially she was recruited in the newly created role of digital banking before former boss Shayne Elliott made a captain's call. He promoted her to run retail banking: a critical business in 2022 that generates earnings of more than $1.4bn annually.
Carnegie was certainly an unorthodox hire by Elliott, but it was a recognition that ANZ badly needed to boost its digital credentials, with it lagging behind the likes of Commonwealth Bank.
Over her time Carnegie had full oversight of the long-promised ANZ Plus tech overhaul, a program years late – indeed it won’t be ready until nearly 2028, and was recently revealed by Elliott to have cost a stunning $2.5bn – although that included building second business-focused platform Transactive.
Carnegie’s initial ANZ business became the genesis of the ambitious new ANZ Plus banking platform. This is an entire new tech system that promises to lower costs, but customers will know about it through a banking app that promises to do everything online.
Still, her promotion three years ago was a big call by Elliott. Carnegie’s background before Google was in marketing and product, with senior roles at US consumer goods major Procter & Gamble. This, and regional sales at Google, was an entirely different mindset from running a big four bank retailing franchise that at its core manages mortgages and deposits, and it had badly stumbled in the wake of the Covid-19 refinancing boom.
At the start of 2022, Carnegie promised ANZ Plus would be available to customers “soon” as well as the arrival of the mythical 10-minute mortgage. This timeline for the app and mortgages kept being pushed out as the project became ever more complex.
To be fair, there has been significant change in the scope of the project, which ultimately became the template for a bank-wide tech transformation. ANZ Plus also became linked up with the $4.9bn Suncorp bank acquisition, changing the parameters yet again. It’s also being rolled out in New Zealand.
For two years, new ANZ customers were signed on to the platform, where it now has more than one million customers. But existing ANZ customers, representing five million accounts, are still not on ANZ Plus or have access to its features. This won’t happen for another three years. Mortgage brokers, who represent the bank’s biggest distribution source, are only now being given limited access.
Still, it reinforces one of the recurring issues with ANZ under the Elliott era, and this had been around execution.
The critical phase in ANZ Plus comes later this year with plans to begin moving an additional one million Suncorp customers onto the platform.
Given the high risk that disruption could send those newly-acquired customers packing, Matos is not taking any chances. He’s putting in Suncorp Bank chief executive Bruce Rush as ANZ’s acting head of retail, overseeing both Suncorp and ANZ.
There’s a dotted line between Rush and Matos. Both previously worked at Spanish bank Santander. Rush was with Santander UK, the former Abbey National, acquired by Santander in 2004. Matos was part of the Santander integration team.
On joining ANZ last month, Matos called out three urgent priorities, and here the retail business was already in his sights. The first was building a clear corporate culture based around “decisiveness, drive, execution, delivery and performance”.
The second was lifting ANZ’s Australian business, which was “not operating at its full potential”, he said. Thirdly, Matos was determined to improve the excellence of how ANZ manages risks – including non-financial risks, and this was in recognition of the potentially damaging investigation by regulator ASIC into questionable trading inside the bank’s bond desks.
Matos will launch a global search for Carnegie’s replacement. This means his first appointment will be his most significant.
In a statement, Matos said Carnegie informed him last month that she wanted to transition to a non-executive career outside ANZ. “On behalf of everyone at ANZ, I wish (Carnegie) well with the next phase of her career and thank her for all her efforts,” the new CEO said.
The Matos revolution is just beginning.
Our most famous blue heeler joins a cut-and-thrust gaming classic
Bluey, one of Australia’s hottest exports, was born from video games and now its creator is partnering with another game, Fruit Ninja, for a family friendly twist on the global phenomenon.
In a landscape of giants, the mid caps hold most promise
Franklin Global Growth Fund’s Patrick McKeegan foresees promising signs for stock pickers as the market breadth widens beyond the tech giants.
Nuno Matos isn’t wasting any time at ANZ. A little after a month since taking charge as chief executive, he has begun dismantling the old regime by pushing out the retail banking boss Maile Carnegie.