Leadership is a contact sport, NAB CEO Andrew Thorburn told the QUT Business Leaders’ Forum today.
“It is more than anything else about people and the ability to engage with and lead people,” Mr Thorburn said.
“The first group of people a bank is mobilised to serve is its customers. Leaders in a bank, particularly the CEO, should be role-modelling behaviours that demonstrate that customers are actually paramount.”
With reference to questions on the federal parliamentary banking inquiry, Mr Thorburn agreed that the banking industry had been taking customers for granted.
“But most of the issues our industry is dealing with have been bad cultural practices that have been a. problems between 2009 and 2014 and b. were individuals who often were not just breaking the rules of our company but the rules of the country and so I said yes I think we have lost touch with our people … I think senior people have become less in contact with the real world.”
He said the charge that it was whistleblowers, journalists and customers who had brought bank wrongdoings to light, rather than the banks themselves was ‘basically correct’, ‘particularly in the financial planning and advice and the insurance space’.
“However there has also been a large number of cases, in the case of our bank, where, leading up to the senate inquiry last year on financial advice, we had compensated customers up to $15 million over the last five years for reasons we had found, internally raised, had been transparent around and addressed,” Mr Thorburn said.
“So I don’t think it’s entirely been ‘discovered’. The banks have gone through a process and found issues and compensated customers.”
Mr Thorburn said it was not systemic failure that had seen 43 financial planners at NAB dismissed for financial wrongdoing but none of the bank’s senior managers sacked.
“The reason was because over a number of years we had 43 planners who had done the wrong thing.
“They had left the company and we had reported them to ASIC and that was being dealt with. It wasn’t systemic because we have 1700 planners in our network and it was over the course of three or four years.
“The practices were at the minimum extremely sloppy and at worst downright fraudulent and so they were being hidden from the bank. It wasn’t widespread.
“It was being uncovered and addressed over a number of years leading up to 2014. Internally there was a very transparent open process which laid bare what the issues were, how long they had been going and how they were being addressed.”
Mr Thorburn acknowledged the cynicism and anger of the public over banking industry practices.
“There is a feeling banks have lost their way, we need to be easier to deal with, we need to make our products and services simpler and easier to navigate."
Carnival Australia executive chairman Ann Sherry will address the last QUT Business Leaders' Forum for 2016 on November 8.
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