CBA’s Matt Comyn ends wealth disappointment

Matt Comyn has made the right moves to restore CBA to past glories. This time it’s on a hopefully more sustainable basis.

Matt Comyn says he “just tried to get the best people” for the reshuffled leadership team. Pic: James Croucher

In just under three months on the job CBA chief Matt Comyn has made all the right changes to restore the bank to past glories, but this time it’s on a hopefully more sustainable basis.

Today he showed the ill-fated wealth management division the door just after its 18th birthday with the bank, over which time its earnings performance has been decidedly mixed and reputational damage enormous.

The concept behind wealth management was to leverage the branch network and brand name to generate ever increasing fee income without costing much in the way of capital, but it hasn’t worked out to be the gold mine the bank hoped it would.

CBA had earlier flagged the sale of its funds management operations but now it will combine all its wealth operations and may sell its general insurance operations.

The combined operations to be demerged account for around five per cent of CBA’s profits, or around $500 million, and a float at around 13 times earnings would value the new company at $6.5 billion.

Mr Comyn was advised on the move by Matthew Grounds at UBS.

Separately he unveiled a new leadership team, although the CFO slot vacated by Rob Jesudason has yet to be filled.

Mr Comyn has nine direct reports who meet as a leadership team every Monday with scheduled one-on-one meetings every month.

The highly-regarded Nigel Williams, who retired as ANZ’s chief risk officer late last year, will be CBA’s new risk chief.

Mr Williams’ background is more in markets and institutional banking than CBA’s retail base.

Mr Comyn has also managed to recruit Pascal Boillat from Deutsche as chief information officer, which is a coup. He comes after stints at Fannie Mae and Citibank in the US.

The other slots are being filled by internal replacements including Angus Sullivan in retail and Andrew Hinchliff in institutional banking.

Only three of Mr Comyn’s nine direct reports are female and he acknowledged this wasn’t ideal but said “he just tried to get the best people for the job”.

This is as it should be and on paper he has done well.

Later this week CBA will hand APRA its response to the regulators’ scathing review of its governance franswork.

The bank’s response will include its nomination of an independent expert to track its performance obligations.