Music and wealth are a harmonious merger for NAB’s Andrew Hagger

NAB’s head of wealth, Andrew Hagger, had been hoping to take a week off to play the piano.

Andrew Hagger

NAB’s head of wealth, Andrew Hagger, had been hoping to take a week off to play the piano at the Sydney Opera House and at jazz clubs in Melbourne and Adelaide.

But he got caught up in the negotiations for the $2.4 billion deal for with Japan’s Nippon Life to buy an 80 per cent stake in NAB’s MLC.

So it was a case of working on the deal by day and rushing off to perform at the music venues by night. “I had to do six concerts in the course of a week,” Hagger tells The Australian.

“I was trying to pretend I was a muso for a week but it didn’t work out that way,” he says.

Hagger, a former accountant who has been running NAB Wealth, which includes MLC, since April 2013, was a key figure in the negotiations with Nippon Life.

“I have played music since I was three,” he says. “It is an important part of my life.”

A classical pianist, Hagger released his third album, Vivid, this year.

“I was surprised beyond belief that it made the charts overnight and reached as high as No 2 in the ARIA classical/cross-over chart,” he says.

The success of the latest album and his performance at the Melbourne Recital Centre saw Hagger invited to play at the Opera House in Sydney with a group of friends.

He decided to make a week of it, organising to play with his friends at Melbourne jazz club Bennett’s Lane and Adelaide’s Entropy.

But the week didn’t quite work out the way he planned as the talks with Nippon Life became more intense.

“The concerts at the Opera House went well. We got close to full houses on both nights.”

But Hagger’s idea of a week spent in jeans and a black T-shirt went out the window.

At one point he had to play for the first half, take a conference call about the deal in the interval, and go back on stage for the second half.

The Nippon Life deal is an important part of the strategy to turn around NAB’s wealth business. And it will free up $3 billion of capital for the bank at a time when regulators are tightening up capital adequacy requirements.

The deal had topped off several years of changes which have helped to turn around NAB’s wealth business.

NAB’s wealth division includes insurance company MLC; corporate superannuation administrator, Plum Financial Services; asset and investment consulting group JANA, wealth management group JBWere and NAB Financial Planning.

Hagger has a string of statistics to prove how things are turning around at NAB Wealth.

Cash earnings at the wealth division were up by 27 per cent to $99 million in the past year and up by 44 per cent over the past two years.

ROW was up by 170 basis points over the past two years while cost to income ratio has gone down from 69.3 per cent.

Hagger’s changes have included bringing MLC closer into the NAB fold, and closer integration of NAB’s wealth business with its banking business, which included bringing its Melbourne-based wealth team into the bank’s offices at 700 Bourke Street.

“We began to align the wealth strategy much closer to the NAB group strategy and build on that strength,” Hagger says.

NAB is keen to get the message out that Hagger has overseen a turnaround in the business since taking it over.

“We have built a very strong relationship with Nippon Life which goes back for decades. In addition to that, we have had very intensive discussions over the past two to three years.”

He says NAB and Nippon Life have very similar values: “A strong focus on the customer and an abundance of mutual trust and respect and understanding.

“What customers and advisers will see is a true partnership.”

Hagger was working at PricewaterhouseCoopers when he was recruited by the former head of NAB Australia, Ahmed Fahour, to run the bank’s private and institutional wealth business.