NAB’s Michael Chaney could tap BHP director Carolyn Hewson for chair

NAB could make a groundbreaking appointment when Michael Chaney retires by tapping BHP director Carolyn Hewson for chair.

GRATUITOUS advice to bank chairmen about their own succession is not the usual province of this column (more’s the pity), but here’s a heads-up for National Australia Bank chair Michael Chaney, who will retire before the end of this year.

Chaney, according to this paper’s esteemed Margin Call diarist, has already approached former Commonwealth Bank chief executive Ralph Norris, but was rebuffed. New Zealand-based Norris has all the right credentials and would have been an excellent appointment.

NAB, however, now has the opportunity to make a groundbreaking appointment, someone with a strong financial services background, a reputation for thoughtful contributions in other board roles, among them a major bank, and a person of deep, unquestioned integrity.

That person is Carolyn Hewson. If she wants it, Hewson, 59, should get the NAB job on merit alone. But just as important, she would also be the first female chair of a major domestic bank.

The symbolism would be powerful — in one stroke, the NAB board would show it’s deadly serious about changing the culture of an institution which has made a habit of stretching its strategic boundaries, while staying well within its comfort zone for senior appointments.

Typically, white blokes have got the nod, although more recently there have been signs of a shift.

There are two women on NAB’s 11-person board, including decade-long director Jillian Segal and Geraldine McBride, a board member since March last year.

The appointment last year of Peeyush Gupta, as well as Anthony Yuen (2010), has also demonstrated a willingness to jettison NAB’s monocultural past.

At the executive level, new chief executive Andrew Thorburn promoted the diversity agenda in August when he added two women to his executive leadership team — business banking boss Angela Mentis and head of enterprise services and transformation Renee Roberts.

Three of Thorburn’s 10-person senior management team are now women, including people, communications and governance executive Michaela Healy.

These are important steps, but much remains to be done.

The bank’s search for a new chairman is said to be well advanced. If the talk is right, the leading internal candidate is former federal Treasury secretary Ken Henry, who joined the NAB board in 2011.

Chaney, with the help of a search firm, has also been sounding some external prospects, including Norris. If NAB goes external and the past is any guide, there will be a handover period to the new chairman of six months or more.

Then-chairman Graham Kraehe, for example, announced in June 2004 that Chaney would join the board in December before succeeding him in September 2005.

There are suggestions that Chaney is currently in discussions with an external candidate.

This column made no attempt to contact Chaney or Hewson for comment, given the purpose is to highlight an opportunity for NAB to make a clean break from its past and, at the same time, secure an outstanding candidate.

Hewson, who was an investment banker at Schroders Australia for 14 years, is currently a director of BHP Billiton and Stockland Group, and serves as a director of South Australian Water and the Economic Development Board of South Australia.

As already mentioned, her loyalty and integrity is unquestioned, which means she might not be prepared to relinquish any of her current roles, including a clear conflict in relation to her non-executive directorship at Westpac Institutional Bank.

The latter role, on one of the bank’s subsidiary boards, saw Hewson continue her relationship with Westpac after she served on the main board from 2003 to 2012.

Reviews of her contribution over that period are stellar, with one experienced hand describing her yesterday as a “kick-arse” director. It was not meant as a criticism.

“She was just very, very good; an absolute standout,” he said.

Super-secure ATM

ANZ Bank has gone live at its Docklands branch in Melbourne with its unique, super-secure “Tap and PIN” technology for automatic teller machines.

Card fraud now costs the industry about $25 million in Australia, with global losses estimated to exceed $1.4 billion. However, holders of an ANZ Visa card will be able to make withdrawals and balance inquiries that are much more secure, because the encrypted data that identifies the customer account is read off the computer chip, which is EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) secure, rather than the card’s magnetic stripe.

Data from the stripe is not ­encrypted and therefore vulnerable to interception by skimming.

ANZ, which showcased the technology last November, is planning to introduce it to its entire fleet of ATMs over the next 12 months, with an accelerated rollout from the middle of this year.

The next step is the introduction of NFC (near-field communication) for authentication and pre-staging of transactions at ATMs, using a mobile phone that allows customers to preset their mobile device with the value and denomination for the cash they want to withdraw. ANZ’s status as a world leader in this area, in conjunction with ATM manufacturer NCR and Visa, has been validated by a visit to Melbourne late last year by Spanish bank BBVA.