Westpac Announce Major ExCo Changes
(25 May 2020 – Australia) Westpac CIO Craig Bright and Retail Bank Head David Lindberg have announced they are departing the group. Westpac also announced the appointment of Les Vance to a new role as Group Executive, Financial Crime, Compliance and Conduct. Mr Vance, currently COO of the consumer division, will be responsible for overseeing the group’s financial crime, compliance and conduct management.
The announcements come at a critical time for the group currently facing down prosecution by regulators over AUSTRAC anti-money laundering (AML) breaches that resulted in the resignation of CEO Brian Hartzer and Chairman Lindsay Maxsted. Westpac has commenced an internal and international search for their replacements and the search for their replacement will be overseen by new CEO Peter King, recently promoted from his position as CFO. Mr King thanked Mr Lindberg and Mr Bright for their contribution to Westpac, highlighting that Mr Lindberg made significant progress on improving customer satisfaction and the digital experience, while Mr Bright improved the capability of the Bank’s technology infrastructure, implemented the Customer Service Hub and achieved significant efficiencies in vendor services.
Mr Lindberg is set to become CEO of retail banking at NatWest Group, part of RBS, while following the same career path of former Westpac CEO Brian Hartzer and NAB CEO Ross McEwan who earned their stripes overseas. Mr Bright leaves the bank after less than two years in the CIO role to reportedly take up a position with Barclays in the United Kingdom, likely seeing both executives stay in their roles and handover to new candidates during the entirety of their notice period, commonly up to a year
Mr Bright only recently announced the bank’s new prototype digital core will reach ‘alpha’ this month with a 2021 commercial release on track.
“The alpha release in May, that’s very much just an internal release. It’s our first internal milestone for, a sort of production deployment. Beta release, which will be family and friends, if you like, will be year end and then, will be ready for commercial release gearing-up, probably early 2021. Timing around commercial release still revolved around adoption by partners, that is other institutions willing to use the white label banking-as-a-service (BaaS) proposition. The partners that we've been working with have obviously been impacted by COVID as well. So we may we may see some slowdown in partner take-up” stated Mr Bright.
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