Westpac hires new boss

‘Battle-hardened’ veteran tapped to lead bank

WESTPAC has named “battle-hardened” banking veteran John McFarlane as its next chairman to help it recover from the fallout of a massive money laundering and child exploitation scandal.

Mr McFarlane (pictured) will succeed Lindsay Maxsted on April 2, and one of his first duties will be finding a permanent CEO to replace Brian Hartzer, as well as turning around the bank’s culture.

Dubbed “Mack the Knife” by the British press for dispatching chief executives, Mr McFarlane is known as a change agent, a role he embraced in an interview with Westpac Wire.

“Look, I’m not concerned about a challenge – every single major financial institution I’ve been with has been in some form of turnaround and a major reshaping,” he said.

“Westpac isn’t in that position from a core business standpoint but it is from a compliance standpoint, and therefore you know it will require a significant amount of change.

“We have to fix what’s gone wrong, we have to make good, and now we have to make sure it just doesn’t happen again.”

In a statement he described himself as “sufficiently battlehardened to realise things can be tougher than you think, and that in banking, nothing is ever certain”.

Mr McFarlane was chief executive of ANZ Group from 1997 to 2007 and more recently has been chairman of Barlays Bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, British transport operator FirstGroup and UK insurance company Aviva, where he fired the CEO within weeks of arriving.

“Mr McFarlane is not only well known in Australia and in New Zealand, but is a respected banking leader globally who brings to our organisation more than 44 years’ experience in financial services,” Mr Maxsted said.

“Over the past 27 years he has been a main board director of five of the world’s leading financial institutions. … He has a proven track record in delivering results, along with cultural and organisational change.”

The 72-year-old Scotsman said he hadn’t intended to take on another major leadership role after retiring from Barclays last year.

But having spent some time “in the garden, so to speak”, Mr McFarlane found he didn’t have enough to do and was therefore receptive when Mr Maxsted approached him.

It was the “perfect marriage,” Mr McFarlane said – Westpac needed a chairman with banking experience and “I needed a challenge”. He will also serve as Westpac’s nonexecutive director.