ANZ rural head Charlie Graham to leave as management shake-up puts focus on four regions

By Bernard Hickey

New Zealand's largest banking group, ANZ New Zealand, has announced a management restructure to pull together its commercial and rural divisions into one operation, and create four new regional divisions that cover both the ANZ and National branches owned by the group.

ANZ NZ CEO David Hisco told a news conference the restructure would mean around 15 management roles would go and up to 30 back office roles would go.

One of those to leave is the former head of National Bank's Rural division, Charlie Graham. The Commercial and Rural divisions of ANZ and National Bank will merge into a single division called Commercial & Agri led by Graham Turley, who is currently Managing Director Commercial.

"This isn't a cost cutting exercise because this is less than half of one percent of our 9,000 staff in New Zealand. This is about getting our business set up for what we think is going to be a turn in the economy," Hisco said.

Customers would continue to have the same relationship manager or front line staff, regardless of whether that was with National Bank or ANZ, he said.

The combination of the bank's rural division with its commercial operation would help customers better connect with ANZ's regional strategy of working with Australian and New Zealand businesses as they expanded into Asia.

"We see a real opportunity in the Agri sector in Asia and India. In India there are 20 million people a year moving from one to two meals a day and they want more protein. There's less arable land and more population coming on so New Zealand is in the prime position to benefit from that over the next 20 to 30 years," Hisco said.

"This is about setting us up so we can be a key player in that Agri sector and how it grows and goes outside New Zealand," he said.

ANZ acknowledged the move was also aimed at catering for many farms as they got bigger and more sophisticated as they transitioned from small family farms to larger corporates.

The four regions being created are Southern, Central, Northern and Auckland.

“To support growth prospects for agriculture, we need to continue to improve our support by broadening our view of farms, suppliers and processors. This includes extending the specialised support we provide through ANZ and National Bank relationship managers and through broadening the range of financial products and services we offer customers," Hisco said.

“At the same time, we’re also demonstrating that ANZ’s super regional strategy and our network of around 100 branches in 14 Asian markets can play an important role in unlocking new opportunities for our customers whether they are dairy farmers, fishermen, wine makers or large agri-processing businesses."

Detail of changes

As part of the planned management changes:

- In Retail, Kerri Thompson will continue as Managing Director Retail with responsibility for all of ANZ New Zealand’s ANZ and National Bank branches.

In addition, following the retirement of Deputy Chief Executive Steven Fyfe, Ms Thompson will also have responsibility for Marketing.

- A senior executive from the ANZ New Zealand leadership team will each have special responsibility for developing a coordinated approach in each region. The new regional champions are Graham Turley (Southern); Kerri Thompson (Central); John Body, Managing Director Wealth (Northern) and Fred Ohlsson, Managing Director, Business Banking (Auckland.)

Hisco said customers wanted to work with one bank.Patchy economic confidence

Turley said confidence among customers in the economic outlook was patchy.

Demand for loans for plant and equipment from ANZ's UDC had picked up late last year, but had dropped off again in recent months.

"People are not spending the money. There are a lot of anxious people out there," Turley told the news conference.

Hisco also cautioned about the risk of New Zealand tradespeople going to Queensland to help repair flood damage when work remained to be done repairing earthquake damage in Christchurch.

ANZ said expected the new management structure will be in place by the end of March this year.

(Updated with detail from news conference, Videos detailing rural banking changes, the approach to National bank and the outlook for the economy)