NAB set to unveil marquee signing

NAB is keen to get an executive that is viewed as a strong candidate to replace Ross McEwan after his stint as CEO. Picture: AAP

National Australia Bank is set to identify its second most-important executive in the next one to two weeks, with a marquee external appointment the probable outcome.

The revolving door of bank executives has gathered pace this year at NAB and Westpac, where new chief executives are in the hot seat amid a period of immense COVID-19 economic turbulence.

This column understands NAB is in the final furlong of securing an executive to fill the vacancy left by Anthony Healy, to head up the nation’s largest business bank. Healy left NAB after missing out on the CEO’s job and joined former personal banking chief Mike Baird in the departure lounge.

NAB’s board is keen to get a business banking executive that is viewed as a strong candidate to replace Ross McEwan after his stint as CEO. A key contender is McEwan’s former RBS lieutenant and head of the retail bank Les Matheson. He is a former Citigroup executive that had 10 years with the group, including five years leading its Australian operations and four running central Asia.

He is viewed as a frontrunner to secure the business banking role or a vacant executive job heading NAB’s digital arm UBank, a now enlarged division including corporate affairs. Matheson has already signalled his departure from RBS, and a desire to return to Australia.

One thing is clear, he’s someone willing to take on a challenge.

In a Bain & Company video, filmed in March, he talks at length about the changes at RBS and its near-death experience and government bailout.

He touched on establishing trust across various stakeholders, but most importantly with end consumers and borrowers, and becoming “more obsessed” with customers and changing an entrenched sales culture.

The video goes into detail about RBS shifting to a net promoter system rather than a score and “inner-loop actions and outer-loop changes”, jargon which reflects how staff can better help customers and how banks improve products and processes to facilitate that.

Michael Saadie, who is acting in Healy’s role, has already been appointed to his next gig steering NAB’s business bank for metropolitan areas. That announcement was made in a restructure of second-tier management by McEwan, revealed by The Australian last month.

Interestingly both, Westpac and Commonwealth Bank looked offshore last year to find their business bank executives. At Westpac, Guil Lima joined in December from HSBC in Hong Kong, while CBA tapped former FNB commercial banking chief Michael Vacy-Lyle as business banking boss.

McEwan has already locked in internal candidate Rachel Slade to run the personal bank so he’ll no doubt want his entire frontbench locked in soon, despite the COVID-19 disruption.

NAB’s NZ chief Angela Mentis — who ran the business bank before heading across the ditch — is understood to have been pushing to return to a role in Australia.

Watch this space.

Ducking Wirecard

The furore surrounding German payments company Wirecard’s missing $US2bn and fraud on a huge scale is causing a series of ripples in Australia’s financial services market.

Westpac is said to have a small exposure to Wirecard, and not via lending, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank runs the German group’s products but on its own internal systems, and payments group Cuscal counts Wirecard as a third-party provider.

ANZ appears to have dodged a bullet. Last year, ANZ was embroiled in Wirecard controversy when it probed a fraud against its travel card business, much of which was outsourced to the German company.

ANZ’s Indonesian bank had also used as a technology partner a Wirecard subsidiary at the centre of an accounting scandal.

At the time Singaporean police investigated the allegations, which included potential falsification of Wirecard’s Australian and NZ accounts.

ANZ fortuitously exited the travel card product about a year ago and is said now to have no exposure to Wirecard.

NAB doesn’t have any Wirecard exposure, nor does CBA.

Westpac’s processes

Westpac’s retail and private banking operations have tapped KPMG in recent months to conduct work on improving the bank’s clunky lending processes.

In retail banking, the bulk of the work has been complete despite the challenges that COVID-19 has thrown up, which has led to the bank’s loan approval and settlement time frames blowing out again.

This column understands KPMG is also at the pointy end of looking at how Westpac’s private bank could streamline its lending processes and an internal team continues to work through how changes can be made in practical terms.

Issues in Westpac’s mortgage processes became evident in the six months ended September 30, a period in which its growth slowed and the bank outlined a target to restore its position. At the time Westpac said it wanted mortgage growth to get back to about one times the industry’s rate.

Given the rhetoric by all the majors about process improvement and digitisation this may end up a key battleground as borrowers demand better service.

Last year, ANZ admitted it had issues in home loan processing after it implemented an overly strict interpretation of responsible lending rules.

Friday will prove another key date for responsible lending, when the corporate regulator finds out if its appeal against Westpac’s high-profile Federal Court win, in the ‘wagyu and shiraz’ case is successful. In the judgment, Justice Nye Perram sided with Westpac’s assessment of responsible lending noting that borrowers could forgo wagyu and the “finest shiraz” if they wanted to buy a home.