Auswide Bank said it hired Damian Hearne as its chief customer officer, a new position. Hearne was a state manager at Bank of Queensland, from 2006 to 2011, and more recently filled a sequence of regional manager roles at Suncorp. Hearne will "supervise and co-ordinate retail and business banking sales and distribution teams, third party relationships including mortgage brokers and introducers, as well as marketing and product initiatives," Auswide said. Australia's peer-to-peer business lending sector is benefiting from the tightening of bank lending to small to medium-sized businesses. That's according to Sunil Aranha, chief executive officer of ThinCats in Australia, a UK-backed P2P lender to small and medium sized businesses. In a media release yesterday, he pointed to Australian Bureau of Statistics results showing commercial finance across the board fell by 1.2 per cent between April and May, to $40.01 billion. The ThinCats group, in contrast, expects to lift loan volumes from "more than $1 million a month", targeting $20 million in loans to businesses in the 2016/17 financial year, Aranha said. Craig Rice, executive general manager of strategy at National Australia Bank is "parting ways" with the bank, according to the AFR's Street Talk. Rice, who joined NAB in 2009, was partly responsible for a major review of NAB's A$3 billion NextGen technology program. A NAB spokesman confirmed the departure and said Rice would leave the bank in the "near term". This continues the exodus of top brass from NAB, shaken out as part of a restructure by CEO Andrew Thorburn.