YES, BUT DOES LATEST BANK MESSIAH HAVE CANCER CURE? TERRY MCCRANN

WELL, at least they’ll be saving on some airfares.

The way, way over the top, almost universally and embarrassingly gushing, media coverage of new NAB chief executive officer Ross McEwan tells me he must surely be able to walk on water.

At least across the ditch, to his original home country, if not all the way back to the United Kingdom which was where he spent his recent sojourn.

Over the decades I’ve seen more than a few “hero CEOs” – and obviously, not just within the banks, but across the corporate sector – fly into the country with lofty reputations as messiahs, only to, mostly, ultimately depart showing they actually had feet of clay.

At least McEwan is flying back into the country.

And not just literally; he’s had a long previous experience inside the big bank sector, albeit – good or bad – at another bank. Which bank? That’s right, the CBA, where he not only could have been, but was, a contender and indeed, almost became the bank’s CEO.

If he had, would he have then “become” the man who beat him to the job, Ian Narev?

Would he have been one of the two great “villains” of 2018-19 – the other being the man whom he replaces, NAB’s former CEO Andrew Thorburn?

Instead of 2020s first anticipated messiah?

Now I am not suggesting that McEwan will be a dud. He could turn out to be a very good NAB CEO, although, bluntly, everyone – and I do mean everyone: customers, regulators, shareholders, staff, commentators and so on – should settle for something a little more prosaic, like competence and integrity.

Just that expectations, not really even of his inevitable success – whatever that might actually mean in the postHayne world – but at a much more basic level, what is actually realistically achievable, were not just over the top but way out of touch with reality, judged on the coverage since Friday.

At the best of times, expectations about what a new CEO can do are at least ambitious and usually “courageous”. But at an Australian bank? In 2020 and beyond? Be my guest. And where do I start?

Even without Hayne and the whole raft of regulatory and other intrusions – psychologists around the board table – banking was going to get very much tougher. And keep getting tougher.

The good – well, actually, money-printing great – times are well and truly over, when bankers could just almost sit back and watch the money pour in the door and out the other side to property buyers and investors, clipping the ticket (and “clipping” too many customers, as well) on the way through.

When the CBA of McEwan’s day could pocket a handy 20 per cent or more in profit on shareholder funds, while the three lesser “big four” banks could also earn in the high teens. Now it’s low teens, at best; and quite plausibly single digits coming up.

In the era of near-zero rates and a much more challenging property market – I doubt we will ever go back to the lush conditions of the post-GFC decade, far less the roaring double-digit lending growth of the pre-GFC period, both of which McEwan straddled at CBA.

And that’s before we factor in the “challenge” – OK, existential threat – of digital disruption and the post-Hayne reality; and I’m not just talking about the multi-billion dollar remediation cost.

Then throw in the economic reality – we could be facing a never-beforeseen combination of a conventional economic slowdown and a complex range of secular headwinds.

Then at the end of all that, you get into the rather fundamental question of what is success? For a bank? For a new CEO? Profit? Happy customers? Satisfied regulators? All-round sufficient wokeness?

Challenging enough as trying to square all those circles is – absent a magic wand or waterproof feet – in one sense NAB’s actually in “too-good” shape.

Contrast it with RBS – the Royal Bank of Scotland – where McEwan is judged to have done a good job.

It certainly helped that essentially the only way he could go was up. RBS was a complete basket case, thanks to its crazy behaviour up to, and so as one of many banks had indeed caused, the GFC.

McEwan walked into the RBS CEO’s office a few years into a £45.5 billion ($84 billion) government bailout, which importantly also left RBS 82 per cent owned by the taxpayer – and so McEwan was free to take the tough decisions. Frankly, he couldn’t but “succeed”.

It is a very different state of play at NAB; the hard yards are going to be harder to cover precisely because it really is in fair-to-(very) good shape; and precisely also because Thorburn had already embarked on covering them.