Director enjoying law and governance
Invercargillbased SBS Bank marks its 150th anniversary this year. Business editor Sally Rae speaks to Dunedinbased director Anne McLeod, who combines her governance commitments with her legal career.
WHEN Anne McLeod completed her first year studying law, she knew a legal career was beckoning.
While she also studied economics and had contemplated a career in accounting, that year affirmed it was law that she loved.
Fast forward several decades and Ms McLeod is a longstanding partner of law firm Anderson Lloyd, based in Dunedin and doing corporate commercial work.
‘‘I still love law and the challenge of law but like doing it with a balance of some external things such as governance,’’ she said.
That included being a director on the board of SBS Bank, the Invercargillbased building society which marks its 150th anniversary this year.
The opportunity to spend more time in Invercargill — the city in which she began her legal career — was appealing.
Ms McLeod moved to Dunedin with her family when she was 10 and completed a double degree in commerce and law at the University of Otago.
Before completing her professional legal studies course, she worked for Judith AblettKerr QC and had the opportunity to be involved in one of the two ‘‘poisoned professor’’ trials in Christchurch, which resulted in scientist Dr Vicky Calder eventually being found not guilty of attempted murder. It was a fascinating experience, she recalled.
Her first legal job was at
AWS Legal in Invercargill, where she worked for two and ahalf years. She enjoyed the work and, as there was a group of young lawyers in the city, it was also a social time.
She was then ‘‘headhunted’’ by Anderson Lloyd and she decided it was a good opportunity; she liked the idea of returning to Dunedin and she joined the firm in 1999.
In 2002, she was offered a partnership in the firm’s Christchurch office. At just 29, she was not thinking about a partnership at that time, but made the shift north.
The firm’s Christchurch office then was quite new — it was a year after the merger with Caudwells — and she was moving from the big office of Anderson Lloyd to a small one, virtually having to start over.
She had to find work, run a team and manage an office; she was also the only female equity partner at that time.
The business grew — both workload and team — and she enjoyed eight years in Christchurch, during which time her three children were born.
At the beginning of 2010, she returned to Dunedin for family reasons and again had to reestablish her practice.
She has remained in the city ever since, doing corporate commercial work, specialising in acting for clients in relation to large acquisitions and divestments.
She has built up significant experience in acting for owners of hotels, including advising on the acquisition or divestment of hotels and negotiating hotel management agreements, lease arrangements and franchise structures throughout New Zealand.
The variety of that work was something that the keen problemsolver also enjoyed.
‘‘I’m never bored. I hate being bored, I love being busy,’’ she said.
Ms McLeod joined the SBS board in 2015 and now chairs the bank’s subsidiary Southsure Assurance.
Being on the board of Anderson Lloyd, and also regularly advising boards through her legal work, meant she had a good idea of governance.
She was approached by SBS chairman John Ward, with whom she had worked while he was chancellor at the university.
Established in 1869, SBS Bank is a building society that has achieved bank registration while retaining its mutual structure.
Mutual ownership means it is 100% owned by its members (customers). It has 15 branches across New Zealand and total assets of the SBS Group are $4.8 billion.
Its story started when one of its founders, James Walker Bain, walked from Dunedin to to Invercargill, determined to give residents in the South a way to keep their money safe, as well as an opportunity to get a mortgage and own a home.
During Ms McLeod’s tenure on the board, SBS had been through quite a period of change; it had become more digital and it also had more structure, while still hopefully retaining ‘‘all the feelgood bits about being local’’.
It was good to be there during that time of change and the board had also been very supportive while she was upskilling on the requirements of a registered bank, as there were a lot of technical matters.
‘‘I think I’m a better lawyer from being on the board. I think I give better advice,’’ she said.
The board had always been, understandably, predominantly Invercargillbased but there were now more outoftown directors, which provided more balance, she said.
As well as Southland, the bank had a big base of customers in Dunedin and Canterbury and it had also grown in Auckland. It was ‘‘reasonably national’’ while still growing from Invercargill.
‘‘I think people still like the fact our head office is in Invercargill. We create economic benefit into Invercargill and provide many employment opportunities, too,’’ she said.
Ms McLeod believed the bank had a bright future; it had significantly grown its asset base over the past 10 to 15 years and done very well out of its subsidiaries.
She also liked how it could provide a broader service base, whether it was wealth management products, personal loans or insurance.
Asked how she managed to juggle her legal and governance work while spending time with her children, Ms McLeod laughed: ‘‘I don’t sleep that much . . . but I like being busy.’’
She had been asked to go on other boards but the bank took a reasonable amount of her time, with regular meetings and also plenty of reading — ‘‘400 pages for this month’’.
Dunedin was also an easy place to be a working mother, with the proximity to work and she enjoyed the lifestyle the city afforded.
More people were starting to appreciate living in Dunedin and she hoped that would reflect in more corporate lawyers moving to the city — ‘‘we do really good corporate work in the city’’.
In Anderson Lloyd’s Dunedin office, four out of the seven partners were females, while she and deputy chairwoman Kathryn Ball were the only women on the board of SBS.
Ms McLeod was keen to see more women in governance roles and struggled to understand why that was not the case.
Women often were ‘‘not so good’’ at pushing themselves forward and some needed to back themselves more. That, she believed, was ‘‘normal’’ for women.
‘‘Women need to grab opportunities when they arise, like I was lucky enough to do with my SBS Bank opportunity,’’ she said.